From Saturnalia to Scrooge: Literature and the Secularization of Christmas

Abstract

Christmas is routinely described as a Christian feast that has drifted from its religious origins into commerce and family ritual. This article argues that the drift was neither accidental nor purely economic, it was substantially the work of literature. Drawing on the pre-Christian winter festivals absorbed into the Church calendar, the carnivalesque and periodically outlawed Christmas of early modern England and New England, and the nineteenth-century prose of Washington Irving and Charles Dickens, the article traces how narrative fiction supplied Christmas with a new, non-doctrinal center of meaning. Reading A Christmas Carol alongside Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s concept of invented tradition and Charles Taylor’s account of secularization as pluralization rather than subtraction, the article contends that Dickens did not strip Christmas of religion so much as relocate its authority from the pulpit to the hearth, making the holiday available, for the first time, to believer and unbeliever alike.