Guttman - Christmas in America: a photographic celebration of the holiday season

Copyright 2007, 2011 by Peter Guttman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61608-096-9

Printed in the United States of America

Stars are shining brightly. Beneath a blanket of celestial diamonds, the sun enjoys its longest slumber as the winter solstice slowly embraces America. A wondrous tableau begins to emerge, from aromatic kitchen counters to frozen woodland dells. Magic is on the stove. Christmas is in the air.

Listen. Across the village green, theres the muffled crunch of snow beneath eager boots heading home. Inside, crackling fireplaces release fragrant curls of smoke. Beyond the valley, sleigh bells jangle through snow-capped forest. Down the lane, carolers sway to the syncopated cadence of heartfelt ballads. Out in pine-scented fields, hoarse rhythms echo as handsaws meet wood and forest growth is transformed into living room altar.

Meanwhile in the city, boulevards are jammed by pedestrians burdened with armfuls of ribboned presents. Hailing taxis, they scurry off with the pent-up anxiety only incomplete shopping lists can create. Santas ring bells and grace department store doorways where wide-eyed children weave a slushy path toward massive window displays. Chestnuts roast in the pans of thickly-bundled street vendors and across the bustling avenue, theaters spotlight sugar-plum fairies waltzing to audiences filled with the yuletide spirit.

Pull aside the theaters curtain for a moment and look backstage behind all the dizzying pageantry. Just how did animated nutcrackers, levitating, red-nosed reindeer and jolly, bearded men who happily stuff themselves into chimneys come to represent the glistening magic of the holiday season? Perhaps unrecognized is that the very core of magics linguistic roots evolved from the Magi, a trio of ecstatic gift-bearing travelers determined to celebrate what was certainly the most noted birthday party in history.

Beckoned by starlight, these Three Wise Kings traveled the frankincense routes of Arabia to rendezvous at a faraway manger near Bethlehem, in Palestine. Here, local shepherds had also been summoned by the gleaming astronomical display. Ironically, those stars, beaming their brilliance so many years forward into our own existence, remain the sole witnesses to an episode more than two millennia ago in a distant land.

Christmas was first observed as a holiday three hundred years after the fact, purposefully displacing the pagan Saturnalia jubilations of the winter solstice. little heed was paid to historical accuracy as the original nativity occurred no later than September, when those notable star-struck shepherds would have spent a night with their flock in the fields.

Centuries later, and some 4,132 miles south of the North Pole, a monk named St. Nicholas was born around A.D. 280 near modern day Myra, Turkey. Eventually ordained bishop, he acquired a reputation as a miracle-worker and matured into a patron saint for children, sailors and pawn-brokers (his three sacks of gold used to ransom a female trio from a life of enslavement spawned the professions symbolic trilogy of gold balls). It then took more than a millennium for the early nineteenth century New York storyteller Washington Irvingcreator of Rip Van Winkleto embellish the resume of the saintly Turkish bishop. He was transformed into an elfin, roly-poly figure who smoked a clay pipe and recognized an entirely different use for chimneys. Thirteen years later, and a bit further downtown, a well-known poem (whose authorship is still under contention) about the night before Christmas was first published. In it, Santa discovers the sleigh, Manhattans wintry rapid transit of choice at the time, pulled by eight tiny reindeer. During the Great Depression, Rudolph and his glowing proboscis joined the arctic herd when a struggling copywriter for a Chicago department store created a childrens giveaway made famous when cowboy singer Gene Autry sang the adapted tale.

Rudolphs nose, though, cannot hold a candle to the glorious illuminations of the fabled Christmas tree. Its triangular shape is said to represent the Holy Trinity. But there were no Christmas trees on those biblical lands two thousand years ago. They were first decorated, then illuminated by candlelight, in Martin Luthers sixteenth century Germany. Vegetations symbolic roots are deep each season. Druids revered the healing powers of the parasitic mistletoe, then believed a curative for female infertility, now believed to be a sign for an open-air holiday kissing booth. The pointed red leaves of the Euphorbia pulcherrima, a plant whose milky sap was used by the Aztecs as aspirin, were noticed by an American diplomat who thought them to be symbolic of the star of Bethlehem. Joel Poinsett, also an avid botanist, brought them back from Mexico and they subsequently became the rage in American flower markets and by 1836 were known as poinsettias.

The spiritual essence of Noel was introduced by the French, who accented the holiday with les bonnes nouvelles or the good news. That news was harmonically spread through carols which had their melodic roots embedded in Victorian England. In the Scandinavian darkness, where winters were longer, Yule logs lit the Swedish night as an acknowledgement of the haunting Norse gods and as an embodiment of ancient bonfires. A host of traditions and beliefs spanning continents and the ages continue to be woven into the fabric of Christmas.

Christmas in America is an event like no other. Its emotional boundaries seem to stretch from the moment carved pumpkins are abandoned and lights are strung, through clandestine visits from Santa, and well into the following year when the Feast of the Epiphany celebrates the Magis largesse. On this Twelfth Day of Christmas, the famous carol helpfully suggests, twelve drummers drumming might just be the most perfect gift to ones true love.

During this season of joyful renewal, some find its physical expression in the sporting delights that take advantage of our wintry countryside. Prancing horses tow open sleighs through corridors of gentle woodland. Mushing dogsled teams dash across frigid kettle ponds with the barking urgency of a moving freight train. Deep in a canyons gorge, straining ice climbers penetrate the yawning throat of frozen waterfalls whose nine-story icicles provide gleaming tinsel for the riverbank. Out on the glassy expanses of chilled lakefront, sails billow on handsome ice yachts as shaved ice slaps rosy cheeks and roaring gusts could sweep the tears from your eyes. Victorian chair skaters seem to slide out of the quaint lithographs of Currier and Ives.

For one brief season each year, goodwill, tidings of generosity, and hopeful rejuvenation spread across the land. Almost anything seems possible, but just like the fresh dusting of a snowstorm that brushes the landscape, all these images will melt into another year of sobering reality and weighty routine. Christmas trees are discarded. Light displays are disassembled, ice skates go into the closet, forgiveness and charity might even become a tad less fashionable. That is until next year when, once again, the waning pastel daylight surrenders itself to a ceiling full of dazzling stars.