I wish my neighborhood growing up more resembled the Christmas Dickens village we displayed every year: residential houses juxtaposed with quaint old world local businesses. General stores, pharmacies, coffee/tea shops...
I can thankfully afford to live in a part of Brooklyn now where all of this is easily accessible. And I’m so very grateful.
I’m visiting family now who live in suburbs. And I’m remembering how trapped I felt growing up.
The post is not wrong, and it's typical of your work in being perceptive and delighting/enjoyable, as always.
But, it is perhaps unduly subtle, working/straining to make an argument from a heap of varied and barely remembered sources when you can take a more direct tact. The entire conceit of the holiday is a dude enters residences to leave presents via their chimneys - an architectural feature almost incongruous with a large swath of urban life and architecture.
This is especially so in the U.S., where the urban housing stock was largely built later, after the transition to stoves (in olden days) and before the faux chimneys found in higher-end high rise apartments today. While swaths of our major cities were just excluded from the holiday. It was so widespread that it became a joke in popular media to imagine how Santa could even visit them; what's he gonna do, take the fire escape?!?
This observation illuminates what real/authentic Christmas (and the kids and families who could have it) was and was not in this country, as well as two other points worth mentioning:
- as I assume everyone thought of when reading the above and considering who the occupants of such high rises were (or were assumed/stereotypes to be) in various eras throughout our history: the ethnic and racial dynamics behind defining Christmas and other holidays in ways that excluded certain groups or made one/certain ones a paragon to the diminution of others; and
- somewhat contra (or at least orthogonal to) the thrust of the post, the extent to which Christmas and other typically American, or American-soaked, holidays and traditions are, indeed, suburban, not just rural like the German villages they originated from. Our depiction of Santa works, in part, because those aspects of him which originated in rural life also work in Suburbia.
That's a beautiful thought to conclude on, because isn't that the American suburban dream at its best - preserving/allowing the enjoyment of the bucolic parts of rural living, like a cozy fireplace, in a modern and prosperous community and economy?
Apologies if this is too long or rambles too much; your insights stimulated a lot of interesting thoughts for me, as always.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours.
I wish my neighborhood growing up more resembled the Christmas Dickens village we displayed every year: residential houses juxtaposed with quaint old world local businesses. General stores, pharmacies, coffee/tea shops...
I can thankfully afford to live in a part of Brooklyn now where all of this is easily accessible. And I’m so very grateful.
I’m visiting family now who live in suburbs. And I’m remembering how trapped I felt growing up.
The post is not wrong, and it's typical of your work in being perceptive and delighting/enjoyable, as always.
But, it is perhaps unduly subtle, working/straining to make an argument from a heap of varied and barely remembered sources when you can take a more direct tact. The entire conceit of the holiday is a dude enters residences to leave presents via their chimneys - an architectural feature almost incongruous with a large swath of urban life and architecture.
This is especially so in the U.S., where the urban housing stock was largely built later, after the transition to stoves (in olden days) and before the faux chimneys found in higher-end high rise apartments today. While swaths of our major cities were just excluded from the holiday. It was so widespread that it became a joke in popular media to imagine how Santa could even visit them; what's he gonna do, take the fire escape?!?
This observation illuminates what real/authentic Christmas (and the kids and families who could have it) was and was not in this country, as well as two other points worth mentioning:
- as I assume everyone thought of when reading the above and considering who the occupants of such high rises were (or were assumed/stereotypes to be) in various eras throughout our history: the ethnic and racial dynamics behind defining Christmas and other holidays in ways that excluded certain groups or made one/certain ones a paragon to the diminution of others; and
- somewhat contra (or at least orthogonal to) the thrust of the post, the extent to which Christmas and other typically American, or American-soaked, holidays and traditions are, indeed, suburban, not just rural like the German villages they originated from. Our depiction of Santa works, in part, because those aspects of him which originated in rural life also work in Suburbia.
That's a beautiful thought to conclude on, because isn't that the American suburban dream at its best - preserving/allowing the enjoyment of the bucolic parts of rural living, like a cozy fireplace, in a modern and prosperous community and economy?
Apologies if this is too long or rambles too much; your insights stimulated a lot of interesting thoughts for me, as always.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours.