"Naughty & Nice": Show Highlights
The following audio clips are excerpted from the BackStory episode “Naughty & Nice: A History of the Holiday Season,” broadcast in December of 2009. You can listen to the entire episode here.
- Historian Stephen Nissenbaum describes the birth of Santa Claus, and explains how the celebration of Christmas went indoors in the first half of the 19th century.
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- Rabbi Laura Baum discusses the origins of the Hanukkah story, and how the holiday changed when it arrived in America.
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- Tyrone Jones talks about what it’s like to be a Santa Claus who doesn’t look like the Norman Rockwell prototype.
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Naughty & Nice: A History of The Holiday Season | BackStory With The American History Guys :
[...] Show Highlights (Click here to listen to specific interviews from the hour) [...]
Quote -- February 1, 2010 @ 1:51 pm -
Naughty & Nice: A History of The Holiday Season | BackStory With The American History Guys :
[...] Show Highlights [...]
Quote -- September 1, 2010 @ 12:12 pm -
Naughty & Nice: A History of The Holiday Season | BackStory with the American History Guys :
[...] Listen to individual excerpts from the show, including interviews with historian Stephen Nissenbaum, Rabbi Laura Baum, and Santa impersonator Tyrone Jones. [...]
Quote -- December 20, 2011 @ 1:16 pm
I listened with interest to the Christmas Day discussion about the Christmas story, in response to the question about why it seemed to take on more economic relevance than Easter. While, as noted, Easter has the theological relevance related to rebirth, which is certainly a challenging notion for children (though those who attend Sunday school do learn it), the most important reason to focus on Christmas is that Christ was both human and divine. Celebrating Christmas allows us to see this very human side of Jesus – as someone like us, with a birthday to celebrate, poor like most of the world, willing to work with those on the margins, as we should. This combination of reasons is also easier to commercialize, a very American trait.
Easter is the rebirth of a divine figure, following a revolutionary life (folks forget that!) and a painful death. The economic focus there can be on springtime and renewal, but is much more of a challenge for the non-theologic imagination.
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