Holidays in Popular Culture
Robert Wonser
SOC 86
Fall 2013
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Holidays and Rituals
• Holidays and rituals both generally serve the
same basic role as holidays in society
• Holidays are defined as days on which custom or
the law dictates a suspension of general business
activity in order to commemorate or celebrate a
particular event
• The rituals associated with holidays reaffirm
communal bonds (while undermining others);
• Concerned with the normative dimensions of
society (because they all reinforce some
values);
• Dramatic (they employ narratives, displays, or
3d theater-like performance)
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Durkheim Functional Approach
on Holidays
• A) profane (secular), routine daily life—
instrumental activities (work and chores)—
tend to weaken the shared beliefs and social
bonds and enhance centrifugal individualism
• B) rituals provide a major mechanism for the
re-creation of a society in which members
worship the same objects and share
experiences that help form and sustain deep
emotional bonds among the members
• C) the specific elements of rituals, as well as
the objects worshiped or celebrated have no
intrinsic value or meaning
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More Dukheim
• Weekdays are dedicated to work and
commerce, people tend to abandon their
commitment to shared values and
communities  during holidays these shared
values and commitments are reaffirmed
• When holidays deteriorate, so do moral and
social order
• Rituals/holidays correlate negatively with
social disintegration (excessive individualism)
• For Durkheim, holidays are socializing events;
they reinforce shared beliefs that foster social
integration
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Expanding on Durkheim
• Different holidays play different societal roles
• Not all holidays are integrate (that is bring
people together)
• Two types of holidays:
• Recommitment holidays are those that use
narratives, drama, and ceremonies to directly
enforce commitments to shared beliefs
• Tension management holidays fulfill this role
indirectly by releasing tensions that result
from the close adherence to beliefs
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Recommitment Holidays
• Most familiar
• What Durkheim had in mind
• Ex: Easter, resurrection of Christ, joy and
fulfillment of redemption and the rebirth
and reaffirmation of faith
• Ex: Passover, focus on a narrative openly
dedicated to socialization (esp of children)
• Etzioni, 2004
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Tension Management Holidays
• Expected to serve social integration
indirectly and therefore pose a
higher risk of malfunction
• Ex: New year’s Eve, Mardi Gras
• During these holidays, mores that
are upheld the rest of the year are
suspended to allow for indulgence,
and some forms of behavior usually
considered asocial, and hence
disintegrative, are temporarily
accepted
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• Since there is residual alienation to all
commitments the tension must be released
through these tension management holidays
to enhance socialization and resocialization
• Tension managements holidays that set clear
time limits are expected to be more
integrative than those who do not
• Ex: Bachelor and bachelorette parties are
temporally bound by the wedding date itself
(yet may be the cause of tension rather than
its relief)
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Decline of Tension Management
Holidays
• Used to be more prevalent in the 18th and 19th
centuries (many holidays today were this way,
Christmas included)
• The decline of rowdy celebrations is the result
of a decreasing willingness of the middle class
to tolerate “routine rowdiness as a form of
cathartic release among the lower orders,
especially lower-class men”
• Victorian influence: holidays were becoming
“domestic occasions”
• ↓ of carnivalesque celebrations came the ↑ of
home and family centered celebrations such as
Thanksgiving
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From “Carnivalesque” to “childcentered”
• Contemporary American
holidays focus on the
innocence of the “wondrous
child” which was
unrecognizable from the
rowdy celebrations of the
nation’s past
• Compared to the 1850s one
finds that tension
management holidays have
declined and reinforcement
style have increased
10
Child Centered
• Holiday’s rituals were invented by adults to evoke in
their offspring the wonder of childhood innocence,
very often expressed through gift giving
• Traditional gift giving established and maintained
bonds between unequals.
• Giving to inferiors displayed power, reinforced
dependency but also harmony
• The thread running through this Victorian
nationalization of holidays and the present
commercialized holiday is the celebration of the
“wondrous child” in the modern holiday.
• Early gifts included candy, fruits, nuts and fancy
bibles.
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The Privatization of Holidays
• Child centered focus led to the
privatization of holidays.
• Celebrated in one’s home with one’s
family centered around children, not
the community.
• The increased nature of the holidays
becoming privatized may likely have
the effect of declining integration in
society
• Individualism rose between 1960 and
1990 in American society, the same
years holidays have become less
public.
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The Significance of the Holiday
Cycle
• What is the social significance of the
particular sequence in which holidays are
arranged? That is, why were some ritualized
and not others?
• Recommitment and tension management
holidays tend to alternate
• Holidays focused on children, like Christmas
are preceded and followed by festivities built
around aggressive, sexual, adult themes (e.g.
Christmas is preceded by office parties and
followed by New Year’s Eve)
13
Gender and Holidays
• Holidays tend to lag rather than lead societal change,
and the more they lag the more hinder rather than
advance societal integration.
• The greater the sectorial lag, the more tension one
would expect between the groups involved
• Women’s roles in holidays seem to have been akin to
their roles in other parts of the socialization and moral
reinforcement institutional infrastructure
• Women have been charged with prepping the
celebratory meals, shopping for gifts, promoting the
holiday spirit and so on
• Holidays sanctified the middle class woman as the
queen of the home and underscored the importance of
displaying status and wealth in making the occasion
memorable.
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Changing Women’s Roles?
• Since the 1960s women’s roles have
begun to be recast however they still
lag behind other changes in society.
• Regression toward traditional mores
during holidays
• Even in households where women
work outside the home and husbands
assume some household and childcare
responsibilities, women still do a
disproportionate share of the inviting,
planning and preparing, cooking and
serving of holiday meals; above all
women are expected to ensure the
warm glow of the holiday spirit
15
Halloween’s Origins
• Celtic New Year’s Celebration originally called Samhain
(‘Summer’s End’)
• October 31: when Druids warded off the hostile ghosts of the
recently dead by opening their doors, offering bonfires and
gifts of food to these returning dead
• Later dressed as ghosts themselves to shield themselves from
the ghosts’ mischief
• The Celtic lunar calendar consisted of 13 months of 28 days
each - plus one extra day to make 365 days.
• This extra day is October 31st, the day between the old year
and the new year, a sort of ‘time between times’ when the
curtain between the physical and supernatural worlds was
drawn aside, allowing dead ancestors and supernatural beings
(the so-called ‘faery folk’, so beloved to the traditions of Celtic
countries) to cross over and visit the world of mortals.
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Halloween in the U.S.
• 1930s and 1940s when Halloween becomes
infantilized
• Rowdy Halloween behavior became unacceptable to
elites
• So it was passed down to children in “cute” ways,
like trick-or-treating
• In the 40s and 50s Halloween costumes were of
spiritual or social outcasts (ghosts, witches, hobos
and pirates) reminding householders of traditional
fears of the unknown and recent social upheavals of
the Depression. This soon gave way to Disney and
other popular culture costumes
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Halloween in the U.S.
• Parents often feel safer taking their children to the
mall for trick-or-treating than letting them visit their
neighbors… decline of community trust
• What about razor blades in candy apples?
• Example of moral panic (and used as a case-in-point
about how morally lax our society has become) and
urban legend
• Most reports of tampering alleged tampering with
no follow up reports or arrests or physical harm to
anyone.
• Discovery of adulterated treats = praise and
recognition (for kids and adults alike)
• When there is rarely trouble it isn’t an anonymous
sadist but a loved one
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Thanksgiving
• Opposed by theologians was spread not by popular
practice but by the decisions of public leaders
• Originally a Yankee holiday celebrated only in the North
• Became a national holiday after the Civil War
• Used to be celebrated at different days nationwide
depending on the governor at the time
• Created by educated professionals and ‘Americanizers’
who recognized the conflicting allegiances of the masses
and the need to make them into loyal citizens
• 1939: Used to be last week in November until President
Roosevelt pushed it to the second to last week in
November to allow for more shopping time before
Christmas (in hopes of pulling the U.S. out of the
Depression)
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Christmas
• Divided early Americans between celebrants
of the traditional pattern and Puritan
opponents of those rituals
• Puritans banned it in New England
• In the South and middle regions where
Puritans didn’t dominate it was a postharvest season of drinking, eating and
frolicking lasting from mid-December to the
first Monday after New Year’s Day.
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Christmas’s Festivities
• Mumming, or wassailing where groups of youths
begged from door to door for food and drink and
sang and toasted their benefactors
• Some intruded into homes wearing masks, shouts
and swords.
• Slaves were allowed to mum in North Carolina and
elsewhere
• Powerful and wealthy were expected (often
extorted) to share their bounty
• Recognized the importance of these “safety valves”
• Christmas was a masculine outdoor holiday rather
than a feminine domestic one
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Mistletoe
• Mistletoe was held sacred by the Norse, the Celtic Druids and
the North American Indians.
• The Druid priests hung them over doorways as protection
against thunder, lightning and other evils.
• Mistletoe is a symbol for peace and joy. The idea originated in
the ancient times of the Druids: whenever enemies met under
the mistletoe in the forest, they had to lay down their arms
and observe a truce until the next day. From this comes the
custom of hanging a ball of mistletoe from the ceiling and
exchanging kisses under it as a sign of friendship and goodwill.
• In the 18th Century, the exchanging of kisses between a man
and a woman was adopted as a promise to marry. At
Christmas a young lady standing under a ball of mistletoe
cannot refuse to be kissed. The kiss could mean deep
romance, lasting friendship and goodwill. It was believed that
if the girl remained unkissed, she cannot expect to marry the
following year.
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Christmas’s Origins in the US
•Nativity story wasn’t taught in New England until the
150s
•It was only between 1837 and 1890 that individual
states recognized Christmas as a legal holiday in the
U.S.
•Christmas revelries became more confrontational and
disruptive when youth and the poor became further
alienated and alien to the rich in the large towns
•Elites called for a new holiday to unify the nation
•They decided to build a sentimental holiday around the
celebration of family rather than community, shifting the
“patron-client exchange” to a parent-child bond
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Christmas
• Spread by popular middle class magazines,
• German Christmas trees in the 1830s, English
Christmas cards in the 1840s, Dutch cookies
and new carols published in the 1870s and the
exchange of gifts between family members
• No longer were children seen as servants upon
who Christmas boxes were obligingly bestowed
but as unique individuals whose parents
happily showered with gifts
• The offspring represented the family and
helped confirm it as a harmonious unit set
apart from the public world of class differences
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Santa Claus, Commercialism
Incarnate!
• Used to shield the gifting process from “materialism”
and commercialism
• Disguised the indulgence of parents from children
(and to some extent, parents themselves) as well as
the commercial origins of store-bought gifts
• Modern Christmas and commercialization appeared
simultaneously. Never was there a pure Christmas of
charity and simple family traditions
• Spending has always been a part of the modern
sentimental holiday and yesterday’s tawdry
commercialization of Christmas becomes today’s
venerated traditions
• Ex: dept store windows, Coca-Cola Santa, ornate
Christmas cards, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”
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Our Newest Holiday: Black Friday
• Total spending over Black Friday weekend
hit a record $59.1 billion in 2012, up from
$52.4 billion last year. The number of
shoppers in store and online also hit a
new record.
• About 139.4 million adults visited stores
websites over the 4-day weekend,
according to a survey by the National
Retail Federation.
• Individual shoppers shelled out more
money -- spending $423 this weekend, up
from $398 last year. Total spending over
the four-day weekend reached a record
$59.1 billion, a 13% increase from $52.4
billion last year, according to the NRF.
Why do we participate
in this madness?
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Reflections on Black Fridays Past
• Virtually no shopper went alone and most went with
family. Bargain hunting has become a family affair. Students
reported seeing infants all the way through grandparents. In fact,
many students reported that Black Friday has become a bigger
holiday than Thanksgiving. As for those who weren’t with family,
many reported having left them behind to go wait in line.
• Many reported a lack of humanity once the shopping began. That
is, people had intense looks of concentration on their faces but no
human emotion. Not a one smile was to be found anywhere. No
one was happy! Usually a bargain is enough to bring a smile to
even the staunchest curmudgeons face – not so on Black Friday.
• Shopping for the sake of shopping. Many people came in search of
one or two items (usually for themselves and not for a loved
one). If these items sold out they shopped for the sake of
shopping. Even the appearance of a bargain was enough to induce
purchase. People bought because they had been instructed to do
so. Shopping for the sake of shopping became the objective.
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Reflections on Black Fridays Past
• Many students commented on the devolution of humanity during
this shopping time. Evidently, the worst comes out of people during
Black Friday. In the malls and big box retailers hunters and
gatherers foraged not for necessities but frivolities and several
fights broke out. Two students remarked on minor fender benders
in which, in between shouting bouts, eyes were focused on the
treasures that lay behind the walls. One student broke up a
squabble over a $59 tom-tom by flipping a coin. In the end, we are
no longer people but consumers and the experience and
phenomenon of shopping is more important than getting stuff we
need.
• One student developed a set of ideal types to describe the shoppers
present (thanks to Jacqueline for the names descriptions!): mission
shoppers, spend money on what they may need, but bought just to
get the deal, "divide and conquer" groups - groups, families, etc
who split up to buy return to home base and decide whether or not
to buy, and the "browsers" who were there to check out the deals.
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Commercialization of Holidays
• Nothing new.
• We’re a capitalist society, it follows our
holidays (“holy days”) would reflect that
through commercialization
• Though communal rituals, mass produced
objects acquire social and personal meanings
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Holidays Today
• Child-focused holiday served social and
cultural needs:
• Create a counter to the class-based
exchanges and conflicts of traditional
celebrations
• Helps with modern nostalgia and the
release of tensions, no longer through
“excess” but of childhood “innocence”
• Child focused holiday also meshes with
consumerism
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Holidays today
• According to historian John Gillis,
• American holidays, rituals and myths are lagging
behind reality—that is, they represent a
distorted view of a society that is long gone,
especially the notion that there was and ought
to be one “traditional” kind of family.
• Holidays can be edited (even new ones
manufactured as in the case of Kwanza reflecting
the rise of multiculturalism and the Black middle
class) as long as they either reflect changes in
values and power relations within a society or
advance thee changes without moving too far
from evolving trends.
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