Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility. The Public Work of Christmas takes a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism, Christianity, and the nationalizing and racializing of religion. The essays gathered here examine how cathedrals, banquets, and carols serve as infrastructures of memory that hold up Christmas as a civic, yet unavoidably Christian holiday. At the same time, the authors show how the public work of Christmas depends on cultural forms that mark, mask, and resist the ongoing power of Christianity in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike. Legislated into paid holidays and commodified into marketplaces, Christmas has arguably become more cultural than religious, making ever wider both its audience and those who do the work to make it happen every year. The Public Work of Christmas articulates a fresh reading of Christmas--as fantasy, ethos, consumable product, site of memory, and terrain for the revival of exclusionary visions of nation and whiteness--at a time of renewed attention to the fragility of belonging in diverse societies.--$cProvided by publisher.
Authors
- Bibliography, etc. Note
- Includes bibliographical references and index
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Date published
- 2019.
- Description conventions
- rda
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- 394.2663
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 23
- Distributor
- Canadian Electronic Library (Firm),
- General Note
- Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- ISBN
- 9780773556782 9780773557956
- LCCN
- GT4985
- LCCN Item number
- P83 2019eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- NLC
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (xii, 283 pages)
- Published in
- Ottawa, Ontario
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)kck00239900 (OCoLC)1084475002 (CaOOCEL)456828
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- YDX
Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- The Public Work of Christmas 2
- Title 4
- Copyright 5
- Dedication 6
- Contents 8
- Figures and Table 10
- Acknowledgments 12
- 1 The Difference That Christmas Makes: Thoughts on Christian Affordances in Multicultural Societies 16
- 2 Tense Holidays: Approaching Christmas through Conflict 30
- 3 “And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!” or How the Grinch Heard Christmas 49
- 4 “Stille Nacht” Time and Again: Christmas Songs and Feelings 73
- 5 Situating German Volkskunde’s Christmas: Reflections on Spatial and Historical Constructions 99
- 6 “The First ‘White’ Xmas”: Settler Multiculturalism, Nisga’a Hospitality, and Ceremonial Sovereignty on the Pacific Northwest Coast 131
- 7 Oy Tannenbaum, Oy Tannenbaum! The Role of a Christmas Tree in a Jewish Museum 155
- 8 “What Exactly Do You Celebrate at Christmas?”: Different Perceptions of Christmas among German-Turkish Families in Berlin 174
- 9 A Christmas Crisis: Lessons from a Canadian Public School’s Seasonal Skirmish 201
- 10 Christmas on Orchard Road in Singapore: Celebrating the Gift of Jesus Christ between Gucci and Tiffany 225
- 11 A Cathedral Is Not Just for Christmas: Civic Christianity in the Multicultural City 253
- 12 Epilogue: Containing the World in the Christmas Mood 275
- Contributors 286
- Index 290
