A far off Christmas from a little different angle this Sunday.  Are we looking back at the feast of Christmas?  It’s the new year after all.  Christmas is in the rear view mirror.

What does the future hold for Christmases in America? We’ll look down the road this Sunday and close out our study. How will the pandemic impact Christmas traditions? Will we still invite people to Christmas? Watch and find out.

A Classic Christmas, what does that look like?  The term classic is subjective.  I suppose every one of us could relate what a classic Christmas might be.  Mine might be different than yours.  When I look at the American culture I have grown up in, there are parts of the Christmas celebration that seem to be universal. 

The 19th Century in many ways looked fantastic. However, the scars of a civil war and the new order of Jim Crow was an ugly underbelly of the Gilded Age. Christmas traditions in America start to take shape through the pens of Washington Irving and Clement Moore. Santa Claus comes into his own during this time, but is the “naughty and nice” theology really harmless fun? We’ll ask that question and look at a few answers this week in An American Christmas

Revolution is a great description of America in the 18th century.  The colonies were maturing to the point that they didn’t appreciate the taxes from England.  For our purposes what was Christmas like in a America in the 18th century?  Did the revolution touch culture the same way it did politics?  Undoubtedly yes, but the effect on Christmas really isn’t all that noticeable. 

An American Christmas sounds patriotic, doesn’t it?  Why it’s like apple pie and mom!  This year we’ll take a look at some of the traditions that we practice and see how they compare with life in America going back two to three hundred years.  Alot has changed.