Oxford Handbook of Christmas

I feel very confident in saying that everybody who has lived through 2020 so far would like to rocket forward to Christmas and the end of this horrendous year, when we find under our trees not just vaccines and economic recovery, but many other gifts as well too lovely to imagine at this difficult hour.

Well one such gift is currently slated for January 2021 release, which will likely work for those keeping Christmas on the Julian calendar; but perhaps that date will change. In any event, here at least is a foretaste of The Oxford Handbook of Christmas, ed. Timothy Larsen (Oxford UP, 2021), 640pp.

About this collection the publisher tells us this:

The Oxford Handbook of Christmas provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of all aspects of Christmas across the globe, from the specifically religious to the purely cultural. The contributions are drawn from a distinguished group of international experts from across numerous disciplines, including literary scholars, theologians, historians, biblical scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, and legal experts. The volume provides authoritative treatments of a range of topics, from the origins of Christmas to the present; decorating trees to eating plum pudding; from the Bible to contemporary worship; from carols to cinema; from the Nativity Story to Santa Claus; from Bethlehem to Japan; from Catholics to Baptists; from secularism to consumerism.

Christmas is the biggest celebration on the planet. Every year, a significant percentage of the world's population is draw to this holiday--from Cape Cod to Cape Town, from South America to South Korea, and on and on across the globe. The Christmas season takes up a significant part of the entire year. For many countries, the holiday is a major force in their national economy. Moreover, Christmas is not just a modern holiday, but has been an important feast for most Christians since the fourth century and a dominant event in many cultures and countries for over a millennium. The Oxford Handbook of Christmas provides an invaluable reference point for anyone interested in this global phenomenon.

Is Jesus the Reason for your Seasonal Rant about Christmas?

I'm slightly embarrassed to recall that I was once one of those insufferably pious types in high school whose first publication was a letter to the editor of the local paper complaining about the 'secularization' of Christmas. I have long since recovered from that unbearable earnestness of being, and am now an unapologetic Christmas junky as well as being an admirer of Christian kitsch in all its glorious gaucherie.

Just in time for the beginning of the commercial dash to Christmas is a book published this summer to launch a frontal attack on the "secularization" thesis: Christmas as Religion: the Relationship between Sacred and Secular by Christopher Deacy (Oxford UP, 2016), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In Christmas as Religion, Christopher Deacy explores the premise that religion plays an elementary role in our understanding of the Christmas festival, but takes issue with much of the existing literature which is inclined to limit the contours and parameters of 'religion' to particular representations and manifestations of institutional forms of Christianity. 'Religion' is often tacitly identified as having an ecclesiastical frame of reference, so that if the Church is not deemed to play a central role in the practice of Christmas for many people today then it can legitimately be side-lined and relegated to the periphery of any discussion relating to what Christmas 'means'. Deacy argues that such approaches fail to take adequate stock of the manifold ways in which people's beliefs and values take shape in modern society. For example, Christmas films or radio programmes may comprise a non-specifically Christian, but nonetheless religiously rich, repository of beliefs, values, sentiments and aspirations. Therefore, this book makes the case for laying to rest the secularization thesis, with its simplistic assumption that religion in Western society is undergoing a period of escalating and irrevocable erosion, and to see instead that the secular may itself be a repository of the religious. Rather than see Christmas as comprising alternative or analogous forms of religious expression, or dependent on any causal relationship to the Christian tradition, Deacy maintains that it is religious per se, and, moreover, it is its very secularity that makes Christmas such a compelling, and even transcendent, religious holiday.