How Christmas Became the Most Commercialized Holiday
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Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- You’ve got to hand it to Lucy vanPelt. She called it as she saw it. “Look, Charlie, let’s faceit,” she barked in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” “We all knowthat Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a bigeastern syndicate, you know.”
As we conclude yet another season of that commercialracket, we are tempted to think that Christmas had once been apure holiday, full of wonder and free of capitalisticcorruption. Yet there is little evidence that such a day everexisted -- and certainly not in the U.S. In fact, the AmericanChristmas ascended to its central place on the national calendaras a result of an intense marriage between sentiment andcommerce, an example of healthy, if uneasy, codependency.