Did Jews have something to do with secularization of Christmas? Not as much as Roth suggests. That’s because the story starts much earlier than we think. Modern Christmas music is a product of the post-World War II culture industry. But the extravagant lighting, lavish displays, and extended hours we now associate with the so-called holiday season date back to the late 19th century, when massive department stores increasingly replaced local specialist shops. Some store owners, such as the Philadelphia retail titan John Wanamaker, set up religious statues and used organs to play hymns as customers hunted for gifts. But the most successful retailer of the period was R.H. Macy in New York, which pioneered the use of Santa imagery, wintry decorations, and illuminated windows to attract businesses years before its acquisition by the Jewish Straus family.
These tactics were successful partly because Christmas had rarely been a particular solemn occasion in America, even in the colonial period. Puritans, Quakers, and other Protestant dissenters spurned the holiday, which they saw as a descendant of pagan rites. Anglicans and Huguenots did recognize Christmas—but observed it with precisely the kind of feasting, fancy dress, and often drunken revelry that Puritans saw as the problem.
Clergy urged their congregants to take the holiday more seriously, but there’s little evidence that anyone was listening—and men of the cloth often engaged in frolics themselves. As late as 1832, the English actress Fanny Kemble observed of America that “Christmas day is no religious day and hardly a holiday with them.” Christmas was widely observed in the South, where Anglican influences were stronger, but in New England, Independence Day and Thanksgiving were the only generally recognized festivals.
German customs such as Christmas trees and the legend of Santa Claus arrived in the United States in the 19th century, partly as a result of the large influx of German immigrants in that period. Americans were also influenced by British fashion, which had also gravitated toward German Christmas traditions under the influence of the German-born Prince Consort Albert. This new version of Christmas was seasonal, familial, and domestic—a reassuring contrast to the disorderly merriment of previous centuries. But it was also relatively secular, or at least ecumenical in ways that appealed across denominations and even beyond Christianity.
In fact, one reason that American Jews of the period were comfortable with this sort of Christmas is that they already knew it from German-speaking regions from which they emigrated. Many of them considered it, in the words of one Reform rabbi, a “universal Volkfest” rather than an exclusive celebration of the Messiah’s birth. The campaign for Hanukkah observance that accelerated around the turn of the 20th century was a response to the popularity of Christmas. There was no need to wait for Shea or his evangelical associate Billy Graham to insist on the religious meaning of the day. Rather than joining in a watered-down festival, Jewish Hanukkah advocates insisted on putting the Christ back in Christmas so as to discourage Jews from participating.