Consumer Rites

Honorable Mention for the 1996 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular Culture "Conceptually sophisticated, wide ranging; [Schmidt] treats Valentine's Day, Easter, and Mother's Day as well as Christmas all within a delicately balanced framework of tensions between market rationality and romantic sentiment... [A] fresh and timely alternative to contemporary academic fashion."--Jackson Lears, The New Republic "Filled with interesting facts and nascent ideas."--Fred Miller Robinson, The New York Times Book Review "[A] richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated [study] by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. Consumer Rites is good history and good reading... A brilliant chronicle of the American tale where domesticated remnants of Protestant religion, not nationalist identity alone, drove developments, and where capitalist expansion was in the driver's seat."--Lawrence A. Hoffman, Cross Currents "Its that time of year again: holiday shopping, and lots of it. Ever wonder how this American tradition got started? In this enlightening book, Leigh Eric Schmidt looks at holidays in our country and how they've evolved over the past 150 years into highly commercialized events... Consumer Rites is without question a true holiday gift, and it makes for fascinating reading."--Washington Post Book World "Consumer Rites is good history and good reading... a terrific story terrifically told... richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache... Give it as a gift next Christmas, Mother's Day or Father's Day! It's the American thing to do."--Cross Currents

Leigh Eric Schmidt is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton).

List of IllustrationsIntroduction3Ch. 1Time Is Money17Church Festivals and Commercial Fairs: The Peddling of Festivity19"Enterprise Holds Carnival, While Poetry Keeps Lent": From Sabbatarian Discipline to Romantic Longing23A Commercial Revolution: National Holidays and the Consumer Culture32Ch. 2St. Valentine's Day Greeting38St. Valentine's Pilgrimage from Christian Martyr to Patron of Love40The Handmade and the Ready-Made: Of Puzzle Purses, Chapbooks, and the Valentine Vogue47Remaking the Holiday's Rituals: The Marketing of Valentines, 1840-186063Mock Valentines: A Private Charivari77"A Meaner Sort of Merchandize" or "A Pleasure without Alloy"? The New Fashion Contested and Celebrated85Expanding Holiday Trade: From Confectioners' Hearts to Hallmark Cards94Ch. 3Christmas Bazaar105The Rites of the New Year: Revels, Gifts, Resolutions, and Watch Nights108The Birth of the Christmas Market, 1820-1900122Shopping towards Bethlehem: Women and the Victorian Christmas148Christmas Cathedrals: Wanamaker's and the Consecration of the Marketplace159Magi, Miracles, and Macy's: Enchantment and Disenchantment in the Modern Celebration169Putting Christ in Christmas and Keeping Him There: The Piety of Protest175Ch. 4Easter Parade192"In the Beauty of the Lilies": The Art of Church Decoration and the Art of Window Display194Piety, Fashion, and a Spring Promenade210"A Bewildering Array of Plastic Forms": Easter Knickknacks and Novelties219Raining on the Easter Parade: Protest, Subversion, and Disquiet234Ch. 5Mother's Day Bouquet244Anna Jarvis and the Churches: Sources of a New Celebration246Commercial Floriculture and the Moral Economy of Flowers: The Marketing of Mother's Day256Pirates, Profiteers and Trespassers: Negotiating the Bounds of Church, Home, and Marketplace267The Invention of Father's Day: The Humbug of Modern Ritual275Epilogue: April Fools? Trade, Trickery, and Modern Celebration293Acknowledgments305Notes311Index359