Consumer Rites

In this richly illustrated book that captures both the blessings and ballyhoo of American holiday observances from the mid-eighteenth century through the twentieth, the author offers a reassessment of the "consumer rites" that various social critics have long decried for their spiritual emptiness and banal sentimentality. This is the story of how holiday celebrations were almost banished by Puritans and other religious reformers in the colonies but went on to be romanticized and reionvented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.