All Together Now: American Holiday Symbolism Among Children and Adults

By Cindy Dell Clark

In a hard driving society like the United States, holidays are islands of softness. Holidays are times for creating memories and for celebrating cultural values, emotions, and social ties. All Together Now considers holidays that are celebrated by American families: Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Halloween, and the December holidays of Christmas or Chanukah. This book shows how entire families bond at holidays, in ways that allow both children and adults to be influential within their shared interaction. 

The decorations, songs, special ways of dressing, and rituals carry deep significance that is viscerally felt by even young tots. Ritual has the capacity to condense a plethora of meaning into a unified metaphor such as a Christmas tree, a menorah, or the American flag. These symbols allow children and adults to co-opt the meaning of symbols in flexible and age-relevant ways, all while the symbols are still treasured and shared in common. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781978801998

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All Together Now

The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies

The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies is dedicated to increasing our understanding of children and childhoods throughout the world, reflecting a perspective that highlights cultural dimensions of the human experience. The books in this series are intended for students, scholars, practitioners, and those who formulate policies that affect children’s everyday lives and futures.

Series Board

Stuart Aitken, geography, San Diego State University

Jill Duerr Berrick, social welfare, University of California, Berkeley

Caitlin Cahill, social science and cultural studies, Pratt Institute

Susan Danby, education, Queensland University of Technology

Julian Gill-Peterson, transgender and queer studies, University of Pittsburgh

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, sociology, University of Sheffield

Stacey Lee, educational policy studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Sunaina Maria, Asian American studies, University of California, Davis

David M. Rosen, anthropology and sociology, Fairleigh Dickinson University

Rachael Stryker, human development and women’s studies, Cal State East Bay

Tom Weisner, anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles

For a list of all the titles in the series, please see the last page of this book.

All Together Now

American Holiday Symbolism among Children and Adults

Cindy Dell Clark

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Clark, Cindy Dell, author.

Title: All together now : American holiday symbolism among children and adults / Cindy Dell Clark.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2019] | Series: Rutgers series in childhood studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018049879 | ISBN 9781978801981 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978801974 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978801998 (epub) | ISBN 9781978802018 (web PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Holidays—Social aspects—United States. | Families—United States. | Symbolism—United States. | United States—Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC GT4803 .C53 2019 | DDC 394.26—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049879

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2019 by Cindy Dell Clark

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

To Michael

May you always have much to celebrate

Contents

Foreword by Richard A. Shweder

Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Spring Season: Easter

Chapter 3. Summer Season: Memorial Day and July 4th

Chapter 4. Autumn Season: Halloween

Chapter 5. Winter Season: Christmas and Chanukah

Chapter 6. How Ritual Meaning Comes Together

Appendix: About This Research

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Foreword

All Together Now is a captivating book full of wisdom about family rituals, celebrations, and holidays in the United States. It is written by a scholar who is far and away the best and most creative ethnographer of the ceremonial life of American children. In part, the book is an exposition of Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Chanukah, and other such occasions as understood and experienced by our children. It focuses our attention on key symbols, such as the Christmas tree or the menorah or the Easter bunny. These ceremonial symbols function as vehicles of meaning at family celebrations. They are designed to involve members of an in-group, kith and kin, children and adults (all together now), with particular historically evolved and collectively endorsed pictures of who they are, where they came from, and what they should value in life and strive to become. The book is thus also in part about the way children and adults work together to create, sustain, revise, and in one way or another become participants in some tradition of belief and value.

These symbolically rich customary family celebrations may be well-known and familiar, but they are described in this book as polysemantic texts. As Dr. Cindy Clark notes, those who are all together playing their conjoined or choreographed parts at some family ritual do not necessarily experience or comprehend its scripted objects and actions in only one way or in the same way. The symbolism and potential take-home messages of the occasion are always open to interpretation, engagement, debate, embrace, resistance, or misunderstanding, which is part of the process of cultural learning.

Indeed, in this brilliant synthesis of Cindy Clark’s decades of work on cultural learning, we are invited to view the process as a two-way street, a cross-generational project, cooperative in spirit but not devoid of cross talk. It is a complex process in which adults and children strive to make sense of and (in one form or another) manage to reproduce and regenerate their own historically evolved traditions and group-defining semantic markers.

Those meaning packed rituals of family life are thus rich sites for the study of cultural reproduction and creative innovation. By means of intimate face-to-face communications between parents and their children, these occasions bind the past to the future. They are formative of denominational identities for both individuals and groups. They are remembered with both thoughts and feelings and are thus consequential for all the participants, whatever their ages. And in an eye-opening aside, prodding us to ponder its significance, Cindy Clark even reminds us of something we certainly should have noticed: that these special family occasions tend to be managed and controlled by the women in our families.

The author herself is a rarity. I have known Dr. Clark since she was a graduate student (once upon a time) in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago (then known as the Committee on Human Development). She writes like a humanist (fluently, gracefully) and conducts research like an anthropologist (as a participant observer who moves comfortably between the so-called native point of view of children and the perspective of an objective adult spectator). She explores topics that are grist for the folklorist (origin stories, mythic themes, enchanting products of the collective imagination that lure us in the direction of deep existential issues), and she does so informed by her mastery of research in child developmental psychology.

Cindy Clark’s spectacular scholarly track record prepares the way for this book. In her various writings, she has deepened our understanding of everything from the tooth fairy to the Easter bunny to Santa Claus to the American flag. She has studied American children’s views of what it means to be an American, including their understandings of civic holidays, patriotism, and national identity. Given her great interest in the ontogeny of different cultural and religious mentalities, she has studied aspects of meaning systems that are parochial or local as well as those that are ecumenical and universal. She understands that while one cannot live without universals, one also cannot live by ecumenism alone.

Her work makes it clear how family rituals, celebrations, and holidays are simultaneously the markers and the enablers of the differences that exist between worldviews and particular ways of life. She invites us to interpret and appreciate family rituals as manifestations of a people’s ideas about what is true, good, beautiful, and hence desirable. Reading this book, one is tempted to say that somewhere in between direct or immediate experience (given to us by our five senses) and the absolute and hence universal rules of logic and reasoning stands the creative human imagination, which is largely responsible for giving shape and meaning to any particular way of life. I am also tempted to suggest that All Together Now is about the many ways the collective imagination gets carried forward in and through family life.

To its credit, this book is not doctrinaire. It makes you wonder and raise questions. For example, it made me wonder about the seminar discussions I have had in recent years with graduate students at the University of Chicago about the meaning (the defining features) of marriage. Dr. Clark writes, When a child takes part in a wedding as a ring bearer or a petal-tossing flower girl, he or she conveys a symbolic message that marriage is linked to fertility and offspring.

Yet in my seminar discussions with graduate students, I have noticed, somewhat to my surprise, that biological reproduction and offspring are never mentioned. Marriage is rarely if ever associated with building a family or having children. Even sex, love, and romantic attachment do not typically come up as features of marriage. Instead, it is far more likely that marriage will be described as a partnership between two people who agree to pool their material resources so as to live a better life. When my students talk about marriage, one of the first things some of them do mention is being officially entitled to visit your partner when she or he is in the hospital. Petal tossing and ring bearing plausibly evoked reproductive wishes and ideals (fertility, offspring) in the minds of family members at the wedding ceremony, but the message seems to have gotten lost in translation or simply discarded as old-fashioned by the time those former ring bearers and flower girls have reached graduate school.

Many things get lost in translation even as new meanings are invented for key holiday symbols and family rituals. All Together Now made me reflect, as I have in the past, on the interpretive fate of the Jewish Chanukah holiday among secular and Reform Jews in the United States. The basic biblical story is inspired by the military victory of Jewish religious fundamentalists and their insurgency (the Maccabee uprising) in the second century BC against the Syrian-Greek ruler Antiochus IV. It was a movement in opposition to a tyrannically imposed Hellenizing humanism of that era, which sought to uplift the Jewish population and free them from what even some members of the community viewed as religiously based superstitions. The uprising as described in the Book of Maccabees was a defense of parochial Torah-based customs (prohibitions on what you could eat; mandated no-work days; neonatal male circumcision; restrictions on interactions, including intermarriage, with members of non-Jewish groups) and a conservative resistance movement against Hellenization. Most of the secular and Reform Jewish families I knew growing up, including my own, have managed to bleach the holiday of these provocative meanings and now interpret and celebrate the insurgency as a just and heroic cause motivated by a conception of human rights and liberty akin to that expressed in the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Depending on the occasion and the context (including the political context), the invention of new meanings for holiday symbols can take many complex and even hybrid forms. Germany is the home of the Christmas tree. During an academic year I spent at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, several of the visiting fellows from Germany and around the world engaged in a lively conversation about whether it would be acceptable to have a gathering where we collectively decorated a Christmas tree in the main hall of the institute on Christmas Eve. (Out of respect for religious and ethnic differences, the tradition had been officially abandoned a few years earlier.) The staff of the institute loved the idea, as did most of the many German scholars in residence. The Israelis, one quickly and somewhat surprisingly discovered, had no particular objections. There was strong support for the idea from American Jews with German origins and family immigration histories going back to the mid-nineteenth century. They had themselves grown up celebrating Christmas in the United States and decorating a Christmas tree every year as a major family ritual. One visiting Jewish scholar did resist the idea until it was suggested that he hang a menorah on the tree. Perhaps not everyone showed up for the holiday celebration that Christmas Eve, but as I recall, all sorts of personal and collective symbols from around the world, including a menorah, got hung on a very tall Christmas tree, which at least for that evening became a glowing and warm ecumenical symbol conveying solidarity, tolerance, and the mutual embrace of variety.

To its great credit, All Together Now is a book that is attentive to the twists and turns and ironies (the complexities) that arise when one tries to interpret other people’s key symbols or, I suppose, when surprising new meanings get introduced in the face of received truths. Dr. Clark writes, If American rituals seem obscure or puzzling to cultural outsiders, this is not surprising in light of the obscured multiplicity of meanings, whose significance is not entirely visible even to native participants. That comment prompted me to reflect on a story I was once told about an American visitor to Japan who entered a department store in Tokyo (or was it Kyoto?) during the Christmas season. There, as the story goes, he discovered an eye-catching Christmas display featuring Santa Claus Nailed to a Cross. The story itself may well be an urban legend—the account I heard was secondhand. But whether true or not, the image is hilarious to many, and that is how I experienced it initially. Subsequently, I have discovered that not everyone thinks it is funny, and the story can be a vehicle for a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations. The teller of the story of course anticipates that his or her listener knows that the passion of Christ and the story of Santa Claus are not parts of the same story, even if it is true that both stories are salient features of the Christmas season. In my own perhaps now outdated experience years ago conjuring the image of Santa Claus nailed to the cross in a seasonal display in a Japanese department store, I noticed the following range of reactions and interpretations: the image as a humorous and wicked parody of capitalism and the commercializing of the Christmas spirit; the image as a powerful illustration of hermeneutic overinterpretation and the hazards of all too generously crediting others with coherency in their beliefs and practices; the image as an offensive (not funny) neocolonial disparagement of the Japanese, portraying them as innocents or yokels who lack a basic knowledge of the Western ways they are assumed to be eager to embrace; the image as a brilliant artistic creation of a new iconic figure or superhero called Santa Cross; and finally, in stark contrast, this shrewd, stopped-in-one’s-tracks, antiheroic but highly analytic reaction: Could it be, I was once asked after recounting the story, "that the image of Santa Claus nailed to a cross arose because the Japanese speakers in that department store rely on a phonetic system in which the English L sound (as in Santa Claus) and the English R sound (as in Santa Cross) are not distinguished!" The interpretive act is indeed puzzling, hazardous, and fraught but also full of wonder. And wonder could be Cindy Clark’s middle name.

Richard A. Shweder

Harold Higgins Swift Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago

Preface

This book carries an ample dose of what might be called justified poetic license. I say this because the subject matter concerns American family holidays, steeped in metaphoric artifacts and rites. As anyone who has ever watched a Memorial Day parade, a Christmas pageant, or a school party at Halloween knows, humans make out of time special days embroidered with symbolizing aesthetics. Children see, hear, touch, and taste festivities just as adults do. Through this symbol-rich experience, significant cultural values are instilled.

My angle of understanding holidays is poetically inclined, since my informants, young and old, led me to view holidays that way. The more I discussed Easter, Memorial Day, July 4th, Halloween, Chanukah, and Christmas with members of American families, the more deeply I understood that celebrations are experienced through poetic allusion, often in visceral and tacit ways. Children have leeway in imputing interpretive conclusions during ritual because ritual communicates lyrically rather than literally. As such, the culturally important meanings contained in festive ritual are not transmitted in a top-down fashion (by parents socializing children) as age-old enculturation theories might have predicted. On the contrary, metaphor accommodates social coordination of meaning-making within families, in unison, without imposing a singularity of decoding or interpretation. Ritual’s metaphoric symbols and enactments allow for contrapuntal multivoicing, through which children and parents often diverge in inferred meanings. This observation is consistent with past anthropological studies of ritual as a polyvalent process and past studies of metaphor as a cognitive structure upon which cultural rites depend. Following those precedents, an amended understanding of enculturation emerges: children’s sociocultural learning accrues in important ways through figurative and poetic conceptual structures during holidays and other rituals. It is important to embrace poetics as an underlying logic of children’s socialization.

Contemporary scholars have taken more and more interest in the study of children’s participation in dynamic cultural activity. Psychologists such as Jerome Bruner and Peggy J. Miller¹ have instilled an appreciation of the social process of storytelling as a signifying vehicle that scaffolds social development. Renowned cultural experts such as Barbara Rogoff and Jean Briggs² have provided compelling evidence that collaborative social action is a key facilitator of situated social learning. Even as humans are social participants and storytellers, humans are also revelers. When groups come together to celebrate, there is spectacle that scrupulously points out particular threads of meaning through palpable symbolism. Festive days are ripe occasions, then, when children are primed through concrete symbolic action to consider locally exalted cultural precepts.

The evidence in this book converges to show that ritual precepts are poetically appropriated rather than duplicated via didactics or imitation. While adults and children interact and celebrate in concert, they do not necessarily interpret in agreement. Culturally situated socialization, seen through ritual, has within it a many-voiced dynamic, distilled through capacities for poetic understanding. Undertakings such as lighting a menorah, baking cookies for Santa, or searching for eggs on an Easter egg hunt carry poetic insinuations that are appreciated bodily. Ritual symbolism communicated this way, through sensory and embodied experience, anchors in children understandings encoded analogically. A poet of the beat generation, Jack Hirschman, foretold that everybody is a poet, nobody is excluded. Children undergoing enculturation at holiday times make deft use of poetics to actively interpret the worlds they inhabit.

1

Introduction

The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.

—Richard Shweder

The family has become so desperately important to us as our last refuge in an increasingly isolating world that all our customs have become family customs.

—Brian Sutton-Smith

The postman recently delivered next year’s calendar pages for my daybook. The spick-and-span sheets seem so neat and methodical that it is as if they are standing at attention, shipshape and ready to deliver order and efficiency. Each page is exactly and evenly proportioned day by day and week by week. The effect is one of businesslike uniformity, as if persons are meant to account for hours and days in a manner akin to dispassionate bookkeeping, reckoned apart from any particular witnessed experience.

Off the page, of course, humans, including Americans, regard time unevenly and with pronounced sentiment. We savor some days as special, even sacred. We regard weekends differently from weekdays, the religious Sabbath differently from the rest of the week, and holidays differently from other days. Many holidays, in fact, are anticipated and planned for in advance; commercial materials used to decorate and set the scene for a holiday are sold in stores many, many weeks before the day. Holidays are photograph and scrapbook worthy. When we look back in hindsight, holidays stand out from ordinary days.

The celebration of holidays represents the antithesis of dispassionate, impersonal orderliness. Holidays are receptacles for what is irregular, exceptional, and intuitive in human affairs: cultural precepts, irrational beliefs, rites done for the express purpose of conveying emotions and social ties. Holidays and special days are part of what binds and attaches individuals to their shared beliefs and to one another. Holidays are socially shared special days, days used by members of a culture to jointly mark time with charged significance. Humans are not just judicious thinkers; humans dance, sing, pray, tell stories, and in all cultures, celebrate. We are Homo sapiens, but we are also Homo festivus.¹

In the hardheaded, capitalist United States, homes at holidays are islands of softness wherein sentiment comes to the fore. Holidays are families’ opportunities to celebrate their emotional intimacy, mutual aid, faith, gratitude, and the chaotic but endearing endeavor of raising the next generation. Insofar as domestic life is a refuge from the impersonal dictates of the workaday world, holidays stake out a claim to what families hold as significant on their own time. Holidays punctuate time to put expressive values on display. Holidays are the temporal landmarks of American lives; analogous to spatial landmarks, holidays invest human significance into particular points along time, and that meaning echoes and resounds across lives. This investment of humane meaning over a temporal span is what mothers refer to, I think, when they have told me (over and over again in interviews) that they want to celebrate holidays with their children in order to create memories.

In this book, I consider shared holidays that are celebrated nationwide by American families: principally, Easter, Memorial Day, July 4th, Halloween, Chanukah, and Christmas. My view of these holidays is informed by ethnographic observations and informant interviews conducted not only with adults but also with their sons and daughters ages five to twelve years old.² My findings show that family members’ vantage points on special days are subjectively filtered in age-related ways. Research attempts to extend the understanding of holidays to children as well as adults have been fairly scarce. Communitarian theorists and social historians, who cite holidays as community-building events, generally have not delved into children’s participation and reactions. Yet children’s part in holidays holds weighty significance in U.S. society. Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and Halloween trick-or-treating are prominent practices in which children are potent and influential. Some years ago, Gary Alan Fine and collaborators pointed out children’s importance in community viability: Children are crucial for the reproduction and stability of communities; their socialization, a collective project, builds our capacity for consensual values and autonomy.³ Children are participants whose meanings interweave with adult systems of meaning; the young help shape cultural practices through engaged interaction.

Accordingly, the research in this book considers adult perspectives, what adults emphasize and understand about holidays, but does not consider grown-ups to be exclusive or privileged authorities. With equal emphasis, the studies herein take into account children’s perspectives and ways of participating in holidays. The overall findings show that research on holidays is more complete by virtue of being multigenerational.

Expressing values on red-letter days in the United States is deeply entwined with family life and the enculturation of children. Not only families but also elementary schools and preschools have long made it their business to let loose and make merry on special days, thus involving children in festive symbolism and ritual.⁴ Holidays, research shows, are integrated into school lessons in both preschool⁵ and elementary school.⁶ Alongside the display of numbers, letters, calendars, maps, and globes that prepare children for the rationalized utilitarian sphere of life, school classrooms in America prominently display symbols of holidays, from red hearts on Valentine’s Day to ghosts on Halloween to turkeys at Thanksgiving. Holidays stand out, in fact, during early elementary school years as thematic parts of art projects, classroom and hallway decorations, school performances, shared parties, and expressive culture generally. "One