Collectors Weekly: How does Mid-Century Christmas relate to Christmas 2016?
Sarah Archer: As I was writing the book, the presidential election was weighing heavily on my mind. It was so disturbing to hear the rallying cry to “Make America Great Again.” We know that factory jobs in this country have declined because of automation not immigration, but there’s an emotional attachment to the idea of Americans making lots of stuff like they did in the 1950s. That was an era when Americans believed in projects—like the Space Race—that were bigger than ourselves, and when we relied on, rather than shunned, facts in order to understand the potential of our new technologies. All I could think was, “God, it would be so great if people wanted to revive that aspect of the 1950s, instead of Jim Crow.”
Collectors Weekly: It’s fascinating that all of our ideas about Christmas seem to begin in either the 19th century or the post-World War II era.
Archer: It’s also super weird that this is not widely known. The Puritans who first settled America were opposed to celebrating Christmas. It wasn’t until the 19th century that Christmas became popular in America, when it transformed from an adult holiday to a child-centered one. During the Victorian era, the drinking, carousing, and harassing of rich people, which had been the hallmarks of a traditional Christmas, were replaced by shopping. In Stephen Nissenbaum’s book, The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday, he republished a wonderful small-town newspaper op-ed from the early 1830s, warning Americans that our children could become spoiled due to all this frippery and consumerism. This is only 10 years after Christmas as we know it today was invented, and people were already like, “Oh my goodness, it’s become terrible and commercial!”
Collectors Weekly: How was Christmas about nostalgia for Victorians?
Archer: The Industrial Age was deeply scary to people. Today, living in big cities, we’re used to smog and loud cars, and pollution is regulated. But imagine living in a period when, all of a sudden, factories started to dot your once-bucolic landscape and pump foul smoke into the air. As the agrarian economy fell away, doing a day’s work meant laboring in horrible, scary conditions, amid machines that seemed like science fiction. It was traumatizing. Victorians responded by creating the Arts and Crafts and Gothic Revival movements, which idealized the work of the craftsman.