Slogans such as "Let's put Christ back into Christmas" or "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" hold an appeal to Christians who oppose the commercializing of events they hold sacred. However, through a close look at the rise of holidays in the United States, Leigh Schmidt show us that commercial appropriations of these occasions were as religious in form as they were secular. The rituals of America's holiday bazaar that emerged in the nineteenth century offered a luxuriant merger of the holy and the profane--a heady blend of fashion and faith, merchandising and gift-giving, profits and sentiments, all celebrations of a devout consumption. In this richly illustrated book, which captures both the blessings and ballyhoo of American holiday observances for 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.

Schmidt tells the story of how holiday celebrations were almost banished by Puritans and other religious reformers in the colonies but went on to be romanticized and reinvented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Merchants and advertisers were crucial for the reimagining of the holidays, promoting them in a grand, carnivalesque manner, which could include gargantuan fruit cakes, masked Santa Clauses, and exploding valentines.

Along the way Schmidt uses everything from diaries to manuals on church decoration and window display to show in bright detail the ways in which people have prepared for and celebrated specific holidays--such as going Christmas shopping, making love tokens, choosing Easter bonnets, sending flowers to Mom, buying ties for Dad. He demonstrates in particular how women took the lead as holiday consumers, shaping warm-hearted celebrations of home and family through their intricate engagement with the marketplace. Bringing together the history of business, religion, and gender, this book offers a fascinating cultural history of an endlessly debated marvel--the commercialization of the American holidays.

Conceptually sophisticated, wide ranging; [Schmidt] treats Valentine's Day, Easter, and Mother's Day as well as Christmas all within a delicately balanced framework of tensions between market rationality and romantic sentiment. . . . [A] fresh and timely alternative to contemporary academic fashion.

Filled with interesting facts and nascent ideas.

[A] richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated [study] by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. is good history and good reading. . . . A brilliant chronicle of the American tale where domesticated remnants of Protestant religion, not nationalist identity alone, drove developments, and where capitalist expansion was in the driver's seat.

Its that time of year again: holiday shopping, and lots of it. Ever wonder how this American tradition got started? In this enlightening book, Leigh Eric Schmidt looks at holidays in our country and how they've evolved over the past 150 years into highly commercialized events. . . . is without question a true holiday gift, and it makes for fascinating reading.

Consumer Rites is good history and good reading. . . . a terrific story terrifically told. . . . richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. . . . Give it as a gift next Christmas, Mother's Day or Father's Day! It's the American thing to do.

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. Schmidt uses everything from diaries to manuals on church decoration and window display to show in bright detail the ways people have prepared for and celebrated specific holidays - such as going Christmas shopping, making love tokens, choosing Easter bonnets, sending flowers to Mom, or buying ties for Dad. He demonstrates, in particular, how women took the lead as holiday consumers, shaping warm-hearted celebrations of home and family through their intricate engagement with the marketplace. Bringing together the history of business, religion, and gender, this book offers a fascinating cultural history of an endlessly debated marvel - the commercialization of American holidays.

"The real merit of this book lies in its complex sympathies: it is at once a major contribution to American religious history and to cultural history."--David D. Hall, Harvard University

	List of Illustrations
	Introduction	3
Ch. 1	Time Is Money	17
	Church Festivals and Commercial Fairs: The Peddling of Festivity	19
	"Enterprise Holds Carnival, While Poetry Keeps Lent": From Sabbatarian Discipline to Romantic Longing	23
	A Commercial Revolution: National Holidays and the Consumer Culture	32
Ch. 2	St. Valentine's Day Greeting	38
	St. Valentine's Pilgrimage from Christian Martyr to Patron of Love	40
	The Handmade and the Ready-Made: Of Puzzle Purses, Chapbooks, and the Valentine Vogue	47
	Remaking the Holiday's Rituals: The Marketing of Valentines, 1840-1860	63
	Mock Valentines: A Private Charivari	77
	"A Meaner Sort of Merchandize" or "A Pleasure without Alloy"? The New Fashion Contested and Celebrated	85
	Expanding Holiday Trade: From Confectioners' Hearts to Hallmark Cards	94
Ch. 3	Christmas Bazaar	105
	The Rites of the New Year: Revels, Gifts, Resolutions, and Watch Nights	108
	The Birth of the Christmas Market, 1820-1900	122
	Shopping towards Bethlehem: Women and the Victorian Christmas	148
	Christmas Cathedrals: Wanamaker's and the Consecration of the Marketplace	159
	Magi, Miracles, and Macy's: Enchantment and Disenchantment in the Modern Celebration	169
	Putting Christ in Christmas and Keeping Him There: The Piety of Protest	175
Ch. 4	Easter Parade	192
	"In the Beauty of the Lilies": The Art of Church Decoration and the Art of Window Display	194
	Piety, Fashion, and a Spring Promenade	210
	"A Bewildering Array of Plastic Forms": Easter Knickknacks and Novelties	219
	Raining on the Easter Parade: Protest, Subversion, and Disquiet	234
Ch. 5	Mother's Day Bouquet	244
	Anna Jarvis and the Churches: Sources of a New Celebration	246
	Commercial Floriculture and the Moral Economy of Flowers: The Marketing of Mother's Day	256
	Pirates, Profiteers and Trespassers: Negotiating the Bounds of Church, Home, and Marketplace	267
	The Invention of Father's Day: The Humbug of Modern Ritual	275
	Epilogue: April Fools? Trade, Trickery, and Modern Celebration	293
	Acknowledgments	305
	Notes	311
	Index	359