Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture. Edited by Sheila Whiteley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, September 2008. Paperback: ISBN 978-0-7486-2809-4, $35. 222 Pages.

Review by Joseph Michael Sommers, University of Central Arkansas

One of the risks any reader runs, examining a scholarly collection, is that collection’s capacity to be hit-or-miss in regards to the quality, capacity, and breadth of its essays. Sheila Whiteley, author of numerous works often centered around the pairing of gender and popular culture, such as Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (1997) and Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age and Gender (2005), centers her most recent work around a very specific constellation of subject matter in Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture. It is in that third term of the set, though, “Popular Culture,” that the volume runs into a minor issue worthy of immediate note. “Popular Culture,” as defined by Whiteley’s choice of essays, is limited to multi-modes and media published in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. Given the overarching knowledge and seeming ubiquity of the controlling term “Christmas” in this collection of essays, it seems remarkably odd to limit the scope of the volume’s contributions to Great Britain and two of its former colonies. Without being overly critical in considering the scope of the collection, it still seems reasonable to suggest that the breadth of possible entries into Anglophone cultures worldwide might have been more appropriate for such a global topic. In excluding these other cultures, larger questions are left unasked. For example: What of the British Empire’s reach into Indian, African, and South American culture? How does/did Christmas become characterized and/or commodified in non-Western colonies? Whiteley’s own introduction questions the idea of how “we understand Christmas […] as characterized by cultural rituals” (emphasis mine, 1). Under that rubric, it seems unusual to truncate the idea of multiculturalism in the essays provided, literally, the shrinking of that “we” to exclude more global cultures. Perhaps these are questions better left to the consumer of the collection.That being said, consumerism and consumer ideology lie at the heart of this collection of essays. The professed goal of the volume “is to explore the ways in which the production of meaning is mediated by the social and cultural practices surrounding Christmas” (4). Minor criticism concerning the scope of Anglophone culture aside, the collection largely succeeds. Whiteley’s volume is divided into four sections that: 1) discuss the history of Christmas from Victorian England forward into the twentieth century in the United States; 2) interrogate the specious Christian hegemony imposed on the religiosity of the holiday through examining cultural artifacts and adornments associated with the season; 3) examine the identity of Christmas as a propagandistic device used during war times; and, finally, 4) “explore the contradictions inherent in Christmas ideology” (13). While not obvious in its construction and organization, Whiteley’s divisions do follow a solid and somewhat causally-linear argument surrounding the commodification of the pagan celebration and the distribution of its use across three countries over the last three centuries. For example, George McKay’s “Consumption, Coca-colonisation, Cultural Resistance – and Santa Claus,” from the historical section, strikes straight into the American Christmas experience directly from Whiteley’s thesis. His analysis of Santa and the products Santa has been used to shill both adorn the cover and highlight the power of Whiteley’s purpose. In essays prior to it, Whiteley defines the scope of the investigation by beginning with John Storey’s “The Invention of the English Christmas” and transitions into the commodification of the concept “across the pond” through Sara Dodd’s essay on Victorian consumption during the holiday.Less successful are entries that attempt to retread extensively covered and seemingly ubiquitous topics concerning Christmas that actually seem to deviate from the book’s stated goals. Chapters dealing with Christmas and religious controversy seem old and academically tired by comparison to livelier discussions of Christmas’s cultural complexity and paradoxical usage (essays which occupy the third and fourth sections of the book). As such, Barry Cooper’s extremely short excursion into Christmas Carols makes the claim that “the genre has a long history,” yet completes his discussion in a very brisk eight pages. It must be said, though, that one of the collection’s strongest essays, “The Musical Underbelly of Christmas,” by Freya Jarman-Ivens, resides and outshines everything else in the second section with its delicate prose belying significant body blows to the idea of a “’perfect’ Christmas” (113). Jarman-Ivens offers a unique, quirky, and witty examination of the less-idealized public display of Christmas that also offers intertextualization with other essays within the collection to enhance the affect achieved.The final two sections offer delightful (a word more in keeping with the event under examination than the essay examining it), counter-intuitive investigations of Christmas from perspectives usually little discussed. John Mundy’s consideration of the filmed usages of Christmas (including some of the more subversive and grin-inducing selections such as Silent Night, Deadly Night and Gremlins) illustrates profound cultural re-imagination of the original pagan intents of the holiday. Thom Swiss’s personal narrative surrounding the investigation of his own life from the mid-1960s through the uses of “specific artifacts [and] cultural texts” marks his own experiences with the holiday in a touching, home-spun manner that only an autobiographical essay could provide (179). It is an unusual essay given the rest of the volume, and a welcome surprise gift left in the book’s stocking that, while highlighting the discontents associated with the author’s own life and connection with the holiday, also reminds the reader of the personal connection the subject matter plays into the life of many of those consuming the text. Likewise, Gerry Bloustien offers a welcome Jewish perspective that, in many ways, compensates for a primarily anglicized record. It is the final essay in a solid, if slightly scattered, collection of essays that contains more hits than misses.