And so politics has continued to be entwined in the Christmas tree’s branches. Every year since 1947 the city of Oslo has sent a tree to London, ‘as a token of Norwegian gratitude to the people of London for their assistance during the years 1940–45’.* In 2001 the tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center became a commemoration of the attack on the World Trade Center three months before, with speeches from the president’s wife and the mayor of New York; in 2005, children displaced by Hurricanes Rita and Katrina were given roles in the ceremony.
Other traditional elements of the holiday were also used politically in Germany under the Third Reich. Anti-Semitic newspapers and radio broadcasts inveighed against Jewish department-store owners who were said to commercialize the ‘sacred Christmas Day’. Good patriotic citizens were not instructed not to shop, of course, merely to patronize small shops where Christian owners would ensure the ‘holy Christmas holidays’ would not be ‘desecrated’.
Christmas cards also took on a political slant. The card market had had a bumpy time in the twentieth century. First, the German printers who produced the majority of the cards sold in Britain and the USA lost access to their markets in World War I. After the war, the Depression in the US and the UK, and hyperinflation in Germany, made cards seem a luxury. To counter this, manufacturers and retailers began to promote cards as a way of establishing the right-thinking of the sender. In the 1940s patriotic subjects abounded; after the war was over, cards were sold to benefit UNICEF – the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, established to provide food and medicine to children in devastated Europe. Other charities followed their lead, and then so did other fund-raising institutions: museums, galleries, orchestras, scouting and woodcraft groups for children. Good citizens sent good cards.*
Christmas commerce, too, became an aspect of politics. German seasonal markets were, in the broadest sense, traditional, descendants of the Christmas markets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But by the mid-twentieth-century many had dwindled to be pale shadows. In both Berlin and Nuremberg, where markets had flourished in the eighteenth century, the few stalls that survived had long been moved from the city centres to shabby locations in working-class neighbourhoods. These markets now offered no luxuries. At best, customers purchased cheap knick-knacks and souvenirs there before heading to the new retail centres for their bigger purchases. In the first years of Nazi power, however, both Berlin and Nuremberg markets were revitalized, promoted as ideologically superior to the Jewish-owned department stores. In 1933 a new traditional opening ceremony was created for Nuremberg’s market, including a Prologue recited by a performer dressed as a Rauschgoldengel, the treetop golden angel that had long been manufactured in the city. Berlin followed, its market relocated to a new central site by the nineteenth-century cathedral. This market, too, was presented as a revived custom when Goebbels, Goering and others spoke at the opening ceremony, followed by a parade led by the Weihnachtsmann, and the circus-performer Cilly Feindt on a white horse. Carols and the Nazi anthem, ‘The Horst Wessel Song’, were sung, the tree was lit, and pamphlets outlining the traditions of a ‘beautiful German Christmas’ were distributed.
The Third Reich Christmas was an entirely secular event, and came with a full set of old pagan customs that were so new that they needed to be taught to the general population. The images – the tree, snowy villages, happy families, carols, markets, goose for Christmas dinner – remained essentially the same, while their sharply limited religious content enabled the reshaping of the day as an expression of Germany’s new Aryan future, and therefore of the future of the Aryan family. The importance of the holiday to family life was such that when the Nazi Women’s League ran courses for volksdeutsche women (women of ethnic German descent who had been born and brought up outside Germany), to instruct them in the proper German way of running a household, the subjects included hygiene and health, home decoration and cooking, child-rearing and how to prepare for Christmas: how to make decorations, bake Christmas specialities and sing carols. Yet the alien, modern Anglo-American traditions were not so easily ignored: in 1944, at one Christmas party organized by a German teacher for her volksdeutsche mothers, an SS officer attended dressed not as the Weihnachtsmann but as Santa Claus.
For Germans, like the Americans and British, had become accustomed to a variety of traditions, and to their amalgamation into a hybrid Christmas, which made them feel as though they were their own, no matter how foreign in origin. This tendency was accelerated by the technological changes of the first half of the twentieth century: by radio, then by film and television. These media innovations both spread new habits and made them feel old. Germany’s first Christmas Eve radio broadcast, in Berlin in 1924, had a distinctly religious feel: a children’s choir sang hymns, and the nativity story was recounted. By 1930 more than 3 million Germans owned a radio, a household object that, according to the manufacturer Siemens, ‘brings Gemütlichkeit and a happy holiday mood into the home’. Broadcasts followed the pattern of most people’s holiday: a religious service (church attendance), children’s programmes (family celebrations), Christmas music (a concert) and then dance music (a party). Particular groups were catered for – housewives, or children – as were local interests – stories by local writers, or in regional dialects – while at the same time the idea of a shared heritage was promoted via broadcasts of carols, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio or Peter Cornelius’s Weihnachtslieder Christmas song cycle, and Christmas stories and plays by renowned German writers. Broadcasts were structured to enable families to synchronize their activities with the programmes: as well as the Hour for the Betrothed, there was music to unwrap presents by, to dance and sing to, even the recorded sound of matches being struck, for the moment the tree was lit.
Early radio programmes in Britain had a similar institutional slant.* The BBC was granted a monopoly in 1922, and its founding managing director, John Reith, a committed Presbyterian, saw the new technology as an active participant on Christmas Day, a ‘loud-speaker’ in the festive home. From the very beginning the BBC fabricated new traditions, which were immediately, and most likely unconsciously, presented as though they were ancient. From 1926, Bethlehem, a nativity play based on the medieval Chester miracle play, and written by Bernard Walke, the vicar of a parish in Cornwall from 1913 to 1936, was presented annually as ‘a link with the past’, a broadcast of ‘old things and customs’, despite being brand new.
Two years later another ‘ancient’ tradition was first aired. In 1880 the then Bishop of Truro (later the Archbishop of Canterbury), Edward White Benson, had scheduled a Christmas Eve service incorporating carols. It was copied by many churches, including in 1918 by the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, where the dean was a former army chaplain committed to extending the congregation of the faithful. As he hoped, the service was extremely popular, and in 1928 the BBC broadcast it, one of a number of Christmas services and concerts it broadcast every December. It broadcast the 1929 service as well, but clearly felt no great commitment to this particular service, omitting it from its 1930 schedule before returning to King’s again the following year. Yet somehow by 1931 this thirteen-year-old concert had become considered to be a tradition of the ages, according to the BBC’s publicity material; by 1939 it had aged exponentially: ‘The festival has been held since the chapel was built nearly 500 years ago’.
By this date, over 34 million people regularly listened to the radio in Britain, out of a population of 47 million. It had become part of the fabric of the nation, and John Reith was determined that it should remain so. The idea of a head of state addressing the nation, if not via the airwaves, was not new. In 1888 George Bernard Shaw was less than impressed by Queen Victoria’s Christmas message to Parliament:
a retired life has left her Majesty rather out of it as to what is actually going on in the world … The machine gun massacre of the Sudanese, and the mountain battery cannonade of the unfortunate Thibetans [sic], are indulgently passed over as, re
spectively ‘a brilliant military operation’ and ‘a disturbance, terminated without difficulty’ – quite a Christmassy way of looking at them.
The address via radio was readily recognized as an amplifier for royalty: in 1934 King Haakon VII of Norway broadcast a New Year’s Eve speech. Two years earlier in Britain, Christmas had trumped New Year. The first broadcast known as the King’s (later Queen’s) Christmas speech, although brief and bland to the point of unmemorability, stressed the nature of the holiday: ‘I speak now from my home,’ the king broadcast ‘to all who are celebrating … with their children and grandchildren.’ In 1933 he addressed ‘the members of our world-wide family … especially the children’, while in 1934 he returned to ‘the Festival of the Family’. He repeated the word family seven times that year, home three times, marking a path that is walked to this day, as the words home, family, children, fathers and mothers were repeated over the years, supplemented in wartime with mother country, brotherhood, homecoming, homely and homeland. As war broke out, the monarch assured his people that Christmas was ‘above all the festival of peace and of the home’, ‘above all Children’s day’, the ‘festival of the home’, ‘this ancient and beloved festival sacred to home’, ‘the children’s festival’: a litany of emotive phrases that through this holiday broadcast enabled the twentieth-century British monarchy to present itself as the great promoter of family, home and hearth.*
The BBC’s own preamble to the speech differed each year – in 1934 the announcer imagined himself to be an ‘aerial postman’ travelling above the Earth and looking down at each passing country: ‘Hello, Brisbane’, ‘Are you awake, Vancouver?’ – a Received Pronunciation Santa on his Christmas rounds. Broadcasts in other years contained profiles of citizens – a ‘grand old shepherd’, a miner, an island crofter – always a picturesque or quaint type, or employed in non-metropolitan jobs. There were no profiles of ladies working behind the makeup counter at Woolworth’s, nor on the assembly line of a car factory, just as Christmas was always a holiday of family togetherness, never, for example, the precipitating factor in an annual peak in divorce rates, or the period when domestic violence rises by a third.
The mythologization of the holiday, and the omniscient, all-seeing narrator looking down on a picture-book world, was not confined to radio. In 1976 a modern commercial version of the Putz came on to the market: miniature ceramic villages, originally produced by a company called Department 56 but quickly copied by many others. Every year, Department 56 produces one or more new ‘snow villages’. There is an Alpine Village, a New England Village, a Frost Village, Christmas in the City Village (this city is New York although, unsettlingly, one model is a diner named Night Hawks, based on Edward Hopper’s famous painting of anomie and alienation). Dickens features twice, with a Dickens Village and a Dickens Christmas Carol Village. Other manufacturers include regional themes, like the adobe village offered by one California company. Department 56 has just one religious subject, a little town of Bethlehem, among half a dozen film- and television-based villages: Elf and Frozen, as well as a Grinch village and a Peanuts village. Another company sells a replica of Bedford Falls, the home of the hero of Frank Capra’s 1946 film, It’s a Wonderful Life.
It’s a Wonderful Life has become the Christmas Carol of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century holiday. As an idealized, imaginary Tudor Christmas was to the Victorians, so an idealized, imaginary Victorian – a Dickensian – Christmas has become to the twentieth century, and Capra’s celluloid 1940s Christmas to the twenty-first: a prism through which to imagine a better, idealized version of ourselves. In these versions, reality and history are mere inconveniences. The first Hollywood talking picture of A Christmas Carol, for example, begins with a chorus of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, the tune of which was written a dozen years after A Christmas Carol, while its opening shot informs viewers that the story was set ‘More than a century ago’ – five years before Dickens wrote it.
Removing immediacy removes fear. And fear pervades Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – the fear of starving to death, the fear of a city where ‘The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.’ Instead of Dickens’s sole caroller, who is a half-frozen child whose nose is ‘gnawed … by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs’, Department 56’s Dickens Christmas Carol Village offers a jolly outing by the Cratchit family in a sled, the entire family bundled up warmly under rugs, and hats, scarves and mittens. Instead of Dickens’s shops where ‘Secrets that few would like to scrutinise were bred and hidden in mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and sepulchres of bones,’ Department 56’s secondhand shop is freshly painted, and, if a little wonky, charmingly, rather than ominously, so.
The twentieth century saw possibly as many as 500 adaptations of Dickens’s novella, and almost without exception they show a better, a happier world, a world of stability and security. Even casting played a part in creating that feeling of stability: between 1934 and 1953 Lionel Barrymore played Scrooge on American radio every year except two. In most of these adaptations, too, Scrooge’s nephew Fred fades from view. Without him, the Cratchits are not Scrooge’s employees but his surrogate family. Scrooge helps Bob get on in business and provide for his family – a story of social advancement in the Depression.*
A British adaptation in 1935 is blithe and uplifting, as the ragged poor and the guests at the Lord Mayor’s banquet come together to sing ‘God Save the Queen’, all members of a unified society, yet one where everyone knows their place. By contrast, in the 1938 Hollywood version the social world is less hierarchical, more American: the Cratchit house is smallish, but not poverty-stricken; Scrooge presents the turkey to the Cratchits himself rather than paying someone to deliver it; Scrooge and Bob, employer and employee, play together in the snow. There is also, in the more religious US, a scene at church, where there is none in the book; Scrooge’s reform is demonstrated by sacks of toys rather than food, the holiday spirit a matter of children’s pleasure, not appeasing hunger: Andy Hardy does Dickens.
Questioning your place in small-town America was the subtext of It’s a Wonderful Life, which, although in detail is based on a short story by a novice writer named Philip Van Doren Stern, is essentially another adaptation of A Christmas Carol. George Bailey (played by James Stewart) has given up his big-city dreams to protect Bedford Falls from the hard-hearted banker Mr Potter (Lionel Barrymore, playing Scrooge once again, just under another name). When it looks as though the financier will win, destroying George and his family in the process, George contemplates suicide. His guardian angel, Clarence (Henry Travers), intervenes, like the ghosts of Christmas, to show George what Bedford Falls would have been like had he never lived: at the mercy of rapacious capitalism, his brother dead, many others ruined, idyllic Bedford Falls turned into anonymous, uncaring Pottersville. On his return to the present, George, like Scrooge, is transported by the Christmas spirit, running madly through town, wishing all a happy holiday.
The film was released in 1946, and barely made a ripple. The promotional material focused on the small-town location, not the time of year, and it wasn’t presented as a holiday film, in part because the genre didn’t yet exist. Holiday Inn (1942) and White Christmas (1954), which bookended Capra’s film, possibly created the idea of the Christmas film, along with Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Holiday Inn concerned the romantic entanglements of four people, one of whom owns an inn that opens for holidays only: Easter, the Fourth of July, Valentine’s Day and so on. The first scene is set on Christmas Eve, the last on New Year’s Eve. Irving Berlin’s score included ‘White Christmas’, as well as ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘Be Careful, It’s My Heart’, which all the critics were sure would be the film’s hit song. Miracle on 34th Street, by contrast, was set
in a big city, New York, at the heart of Christmas commerce, Macy’s department store, where Kris Kringle himself (Edmund Gwenn) is hired by the non-believing Doris (Maureen O’Hara) to be the store’s resident Santa. His Santa-like generosity is interpreted as mental illness, requiring him to prove in court that he is the ‘real’ Santa. He does, Doris gives up work to marry and raise a family, and order is restored.
Unlike these films, where the beneficence of modern capitalism is never questioned, the good flourish and the evil suffer, It’s a Wonderful Life is more truly Dickensian in its acceptance of darkness. George ends happily, like Bob Cratchit, but Potter/Scrooge learns no lessons, and his crimes are never mentioned, much less punished. And so the film languished, and instead the new medium of television reshaped the presentation of Christmas once more. The new genre of the Christmas Special was neither special, in that the shows were old-fashioned variety productions, nor were they particularly Christmassy.
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