Mingling popular, commercial, national, and personal Christmas meanings

 

Around the time of Thanksgiving the Christmas lawn art goes up

The colorful and large pieces of store-bought lawn art attract some attention of passing traffic in mid-day, but at night the accompanying lights attached or internal to the inflatable figure stand out especially vividly. This business benefits from visibility on a main road in the city so they rotate the themes of lawn displays four or five times in the annual cycle: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, maybe Easter, possibly something patriotic from Memorial Day (end of May) weekend and into Independence Day (start of July). Without asking the proprietors it is hard to say what may be the mix of motivations or to estimate which of them is strongest: business name recognition/visibility, community spiritedness, tradition of the earlier proprietors or family memories, creative impulse to express publicly, and so on.

The figures in the photo include the 1966 cartoon adaptation of Dr. Seuss' (1957) How the Grinch Stole Christmas (reindeer dog and green Grinch), the Snowman from the 1964 stop-action animation of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and at the right edge of the frame, partly protected by the roof overhang, is the standard Santa Claus (or Saint Nicolas) figure in costume. Both of the Christmas TV special productions concern gift giving, cold weather, community spirit, and wishes fulfilled in spite of obstacles faced by the protagonist(s). And the Santa (or British and colonial Father Christmas) also has roots in the church calendar and stories, too. None of the figures quotes Bible scripture or sings church hymns, though. But this ensemble has a cultural logic that makes this mix of figures coherent.

There are many ways to view the scene, depending on one's own interests and beliefs about the best way to kindle a Christmas spirit and acknowledge the holiday's original and its present-day meanings. Some will foreground the happy, fun, and spendy feeling of the weeks before and maybe a few days after the December 25 calendar date. Others will mainly feel a communal and nation-sized synchronicity with fellow citizens all doing something along the lines of celebrating good things in life (or grieving the absence of those things due to recent losses, change in fortune or health, and nostalgia for not achieving remembered and imagined heights of Christmas celebrating). Worshipers organized into religious bodies will celebrate congregationally with seasonal food and music and orders-of-worship to retell the story of Jesus' birth and its lead up, too. A few may resist the headlong consumerist compulsory gift-giving and disengage from the swirling mass media, pop culture, and annual merry-making; not disrespecting all those others enjoying themselves, but withdrawing from the general busyness of the season and clinging to the somber theme of the shortest days and weeks of the Earth's rotation around the Sun at winter solstice. None of this approaches is mutually exclusive of the others since a person can feeling all of these things to some degree in sequence or at the same time. Many others have religious life other than the Christian calendar at the end of the year (or none at all). So all the special efforts present a prominent, dominant, but otherwise low-relevance repeat each year.

Compared to 50 or 100 years ago, some dimensions of the Christmas season remain the same, while others bear little resemblance to what came before. As a young child the whole transformation of routines at home and out in public is wondrous and seems effortless: it just happens, like a force of nature. As an older child there is less magic and more active participation in the making of Christmas decoration, food, atmosphere and socializing. As an adult with or without children there is much more involvement in producing Christmas for others to see, to participate, and to reflect on prior experiences, too. So those life-cycle perspectives probably are similar in 2023, 1973, or 1923. But the scale, expense, and excesses of the business cycle of today surely dwarf the way things went in those earlier lifetimes.

Seeing this photo in daylight, or again against the darkness of short days, the first spark of meaning from the season's figures brings a smile of recognition and the associated positive memories when having first seen the stories they belong to. But by thinking beyond that initial reaction, it turns out that there are many layers of meaning, depending on a person's age, formative years (decade), budget, social obligations and network, primary connection to the holiday (religious or not, businessperson or not, USA born or newly immigrated) and so on.