With just a few weeks to go before Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, holiday celebrations are in full swing, particularly in the world of art, music, cinema and dance. While many Americans may love the yearly seasonal programming of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965) and Christmas albums by famous singers, these holiday traditions can also be viewed as just another sales gimmick that enforces set choices about creative expression.
To debate the importance of holiday arts traditions and to better understand why we continue these traditions, The Daily sat down with David Guss, associate professor in the department of Anthropology and specialist in cultural performance and popular culture.
Tufts Daily: From the Nutcracker ballet to Christmas carols to films such as "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946), each holiday season brings back a similar canon of artistic works, performances and practices. As we approach this holiday season, what does it mean for our society that we actively continue these predetermined cultural performances? Is there an importance in maintaining these traditions?
David Guss: There are two things going on. On one hand, there is a type of digestible art that tries to get us to spend, that homogenizes our traditions. This homogenization may be very different from popular expressions of tradition, expressions that by their nature are creative. These popular traditions at the holidays can be a way that lets people be creative in their lives, in ways that they otherwise are not.
That's the beautiful part of holiday traditions and festivals. Whether it's cooking a big holiday meal, the decoration of the table or trimming a Christmas tree, people are expressing themselves in a very personal way.
TD: Understanding that there is this creativity at a personal level, can we say that many of the more homogenous holiday traditions are an attempt to create a sense of inclusiveness within a diverse population? Do they act to bring together large groups of different people?
DG: Our celebration of Christmas in the United States has been exported throughout the world. As part of American consumerism and American culture, be it through Hollywood or TV (media being one of the main products we produce), Christmas has clearly been exported. Not Christmas, per se, but our form of celebrating Christmas, and sometimes in really pathetic ways.
In Venezuela, where I lived for many years, all the stores would erect fir trees at Christmas, which is a tree you wouldn't have in Venezuela. There were images of Santa Claus all bundled up in the snow, in a way in which you would expire if you had to bundle up like that in the warm climate of Venezuela. People in these cultures now associate these icons with the way that Christmas should be celebrated, which is an export of the American ideal and which is also a very compulsive, commercial notion.
This exportation of American Christmas celebrations also can destroy creativity within the home. For instance, in Holland, families get together at Christmas and write poems about members of the family, which they then share with each other. These poems are part of an oral tradition that asks people to be creative and intimate, in a way that they might not be in their daily lives.
In Holland, like many places, this tradition is starting to disappear, and you are beginning to see a certain type of iconography coming from the United States, with a white Christmas, with sleigh bells, with Santa on the roof, with having a big fir tree. This is not about the holiday, but about our notion of how the holiday should be celebrated. There is a great power for our media to export those ideas in the international community.
The problem that's happened today - if you see it as a problem - is that the public space outside the home has been taken over by the commercial expression of the holiday. Formerly, Christmas lasted twelve days, and a large part of the holiday happened outside the home, including going to church, or going caroling.
These were ways of creating community, and there was an enormous exchange and reciprocity. What the holiday actually accomplished in terms of recreating ties in the community, however, today no longer exists. Holidays have been reduced to the nuclear family. The holiday only happens inside of the home, for one day. It has to be short, of course, to reaffirm the logic of capitalism. People can't spend twelve days celebrating. Holidays have been subsumed by commercial expressions.
TD: Is there any future for the revitalization of community and creativity? Is the Hallmark holiday here to stay?
DG: Holidays are times to celebrate ourselves, and who we are. What we do at American holidays is celebrate the economy. These holidays are a masking, under a religious mask, of the fact that what we are really celebrating is the economy. The holidays start the day after Thanksgiving, which is called Black Friday, when all the stores hope to move themselves into the black. Our economy depends in part on Christmas - and that's a real burden for Jesus to be carrying.
