review of Battle for Christmas

[bunrab]

OK, review's up at Amazon, here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679740384/ref=cm_cr_thx_view
You might have to scroll down a bit to find my review - there are 18 others. Mine's the newest, though.

As usual, please clicky the little "yes" button for my review, to feed my monstrous ego. Thx.

Comments

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

He's not tearing things down; he's mainly mourning the loss of a noisier, more public Christmas, and the loss of hands-on charity where the rich had to acknowledge that there were poor people and that the rich owed the poor something. He traces the change in celebrating Christmas - how it switched to being a family celebration where people gave presents to their dependents, their children, rather than giving food, drink and clothing to their dependents in the larger sense, the peasantry/tenant farmers/manual laborers from their surrounding communities. He's not even complaining about the commercialism of Christmas - he's complaining that the rise of industrial capitalism has made such commercialism necessary in order to get any recognition of Christmas at all.

Sorry, that sounds sorta complex - but really, the book is not negative toward Christmas, or negative toward how we celebrate, only negative toward our lack of understanding of why we celebrate it the way we do.