Holidays in Popular Culture
Robert Wonser
SOC 86 – Fall 2011
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)
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 recreation 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
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
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 fr4om the
close adherence to beliefs
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
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
• 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)
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
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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
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 love one/
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)
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.
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
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
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
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”
Our Newest Holiday: Black Friday
• According to the National
Retail Federation, Americans
spent 45 Billion on Black
Friday 2010
• 212 million shoppers visited
stores and websites over Black
Friday weekend, up from 195
million last year.
• People also spent more, with
the average shopper this
weekend spending $365.34, up
from last year’s $343.31
Why do we participate
in this madness?
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.
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.
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
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
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