Consumer rites : the buying & selling of American holidays
Reexamining the story of holidays in the United States, Leigh Schmidt shows that commercial appropriations of these occasions were actually as religious in form as they were secular. The new rituals of America's holiday bazaar offered a luxuriant merger of the holy and the profane - a heady blend of fashion and faith, merchandising and gift giving, profits and sentiments. In this richly illustrated book that captures both the blessings and ballyhoo of American holiday observances from the mid-eighteenth century through the twentieth, the author offers a reassessment of the "consumer rites" that various social critics have long decried for their spiritual emptiness and banal sentimentality
Print Book, English, ©1995
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., ©1995
xvi, 363 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780691029801, 9780691017211, 0691029806, 0691017212
32272045
Time is money. Church festivals and commercial fairs : the peddling of festivity
"Enterprise holds carnival while poetry keeps Lent" : from Sabbatarian discipline to romantic longing
A commercial revolution : national holidays and the consumer culture
St. Valentine's day greeting. St. Valentine's pilgrimage from Christian martyr to patron of love
The handmade and the ready-made : of puzzle purses, chapbooks, and the valentine vogue
Remaking the holiday's rituals : the marketing of valentines, 1840-1860
Mock valentines : a private charivari
"A meaner sort of merchandize" or, "A pleasure without alloy"? : the new fashion contested and celebrated
Expanding holiday trade : from confectioners' hearts to Hallmark cards
Christmas bazaar. The rites of the New Year : revels, gifts, resolutions, and watch nights
The birth of the Christmas market, 1820-1900
Shopping towards Bethlehem : women and the Victorian Christmas
Christmas cathedrals : Wanamaker's and the consecration of the marketplace
Magi, miracles, and Macy's : enchantment and disenchantment in the modern celebration
Putting Christ in Christmas and keeping him there : the piety of protest. Easter parade. "In the beauty of the lilies" : the art of church decoration and the art of window display
Piety, fashion, and a spring promenade
"A bewildering array of plastic forms" : Easter knickknacks and novelties
Raining on the Easter parade : protest, subversion, and disquiet
Mother's Day bouquet. Anna Jarvis and the churches : sources of a new celebration
Commercial floriculture and the moral economy of flowers : the marketing of Mother's Day
Pirates, profiteers and trespassers : negotiating the bounds of church, home, and marketplace
The invention of Father's Day : the humbug of modern ritual
Epilogue : April Fools? : trade, trickery, and modern celebration