The History of Christmas From Bethlehem to the Big Box Store

Every December, the same question resurfaces in living rooms, pulpits, and shopping mall parking lots across America: what happened to the "real" Christmas?

The answer, this book argues, is more surprising than either side of that argument usually admits. There was never a single, pure Christmas to lose. From a fourth-century Church quietly absorbing a Roman sun-god festival, to Puritans who banned the holiday outright as unbiblical excess, to a handful of nineteenth-century writers and illustrators who invented Santa Claus, the Christmas tree, and the modern greeting card almost from scratch - Christmas has always been rebuilt by whatever era got hold of it.

Robert F. Geissler traces that two-thousand-year chain of reinvention through the Victorian parlor, the department store window, the Coca-Cola ad, and the Amazon warehouse - right up to today's culture-war headlines. The result is a clear-eyed, evenhanded history of how a manger became a marketing calendar, and why that was never really a betrayal at all.