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Christmas in Pennsylvania: A Folk-Cultural Study
The return of a bestselling classic with new material. Full-color vintage images for the first time. A new selection of recipes from Pennsylvania's Christmas past.
- GenresChristmasNonfiction
225 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 17, 2010
I didn't get very far in this one...it was too erudite for me at the moment. Right now I need stuff I can fly through at 3 AM.
December 26, 2015
The things I did not know! I'm going to have to start planning Christmas 2016 A LOT SOONER - and horde up some horns for exercising them buccinator muscles
December 18, 2023
A FASCINATING HISTORICAL STUDY OF PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH TRADITIONS, AND MORE
The 1999 Publisher’s Note to this 1959 book explains, “Stackpole Books is proud to bring back into print [this book]… Forty years after its original publication by the Pennsylvania Folklife Society, the work remains vital as both a document of Pennsylvania’s rich Christmas traditions and a prototype of folk-cultural studies in America.”
Author Alfred Shoemaker wrote in the Foreword, “[This book] is, needless to say, not an account of the way Christmas is celebrated in the commonwealth today. For nowadays Christmas in Pennsylvania differs not an iota from Christmas in, say, Maine, or Minnesota… our approach to Christmas in Pennsylvania is a folk-cultural one… we have taken recourse to … cultural anthropology. And we have applied its most recently developed technique in studying regional cultures---acculturation---to this study… Pennsylvania was settled by peoples representing different folk cultures, one British Isles in background, the other Continental… Quaker, Scotch-Irish, and Pennsylvania Dutch. The purposes of this volume are (1) to describe the folk-cultural background of Pennsylvania as it relates to Christmas, (2) to describe the ... colorful folk practices at Christmas time in the commonwealth, and (3) to show how these Christmas folk practices fared in the acculturation process.”
He explains in the Introduction, “Because of the great religious and folk-cultural variation in Colonial Pennsylvania, there was no uniform eighteenth-century ‘Pennsylvania Christmas.’ If one belonged to the Episcopalians or Lutherans or some other pro-Christmas denomination, one celebrated Christmas; if one was a Quaker or a Mennonite or a Presbyterian, one did one’s best, like the Puritans, to ignore it.” (Pg. xiv)
Later, he adds, “Like their Quaker neighbors, the Presbyterians made very little of the Christmas festival in earlier years….The official view of Christmas as a rival to the Sabbath… greatly regretted ‘that the day is ordinarily spent so irreverently by those who would observe it, and who would dignify it with the Saviour’s name.’ … That the Presbyterians had made some accommodations to Christmas by mid-nineteenth century is evident from the reminiscences of Robert Blair Risk… in 1912, [who] draws a nostalgic picture of Christmas among the Lancaster County Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in the nineteenth century, who while they restrained themselves from too exuberant a Christmas celebration, had already adopted some of the customs of the Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors.” (Pg. xxi-xxii)
He explains, “In the anglicization process, dialect Christ-kindel became Krist-kingle or Kriss-kingle. And Kriss-kingle, by virtue of a philological law known as progressive assimilation, was altered to Kriss Kringle. This charge was effected, however, not without considerable ‘cussing’ and name-calling. The educated Pennsylvania Dutchman saw RED whenever any writer ‘mutilated’ Christ-kindel to Kriss Kringle. He could partly stomach Kriss-kingle but NOT Kriss Kringle.” (Pg. 35)
This book will be of great interest to those studying the history and development of Christmas in this country.
The 1999 Publisher’s Note to this 1959 book explains, “Stackpole Books is proud to bring back into print [this book]… Forty years after its original publication by the Pennsylvania Folklife Society, the work remains vital as both a document of Pennsylvania’s rich Christmas traditions and a prototype of folk-cultural studies in America.”
Author Alfred Shoemaker wrote in the Foreword, “[This book] is, needless to say, not an account of the way Christmas is celebrated in the commonwealth today. For nowadays Christmas in Pennsylvania differs not an iota from Christmas in, say, Maine, or Minnesota… our approach to Christmas in Pennsylvania is a folk-cultural one… we have taken recourse to … cultural anthropology. And we have applied its most recently developed technique in studying regional cultures---acculturation---to this study… Pennsylvania was settled by peoples representing different folk cultures, one British Isles in background, the other Continental… Quaker, Scotch-Irish, and Pennsylvania Dutch. The purposes of this volume are (1) to describe the folk-cultural background of Pennsylvania as it relates to Christmas, (2) to describe the ... colorful folk practices at Christmas time in the commonwealth, and (3) to show how these Christmas folk practices fared in the acculturation process.”
He explains in the Introduction, “Because of the great religious and folk-cultural variation in Colonial Pennsylvania, there was no uniform eighteenth-century ‘Pennsylvania Christmas.’ If one belonged to the Episcopalians or Lutherans or some other pro-Christmas denomination, one celebrated Christmas; if one was a Quaker or a Mennonite or a Presbyterian, one did one’s best, like the Puritans, to ignore it.” (Pg. xiv)
Later, he adds, “Like their Quaker neighbors, the Presbyterians made very little of the Christmas festival in earlier years….The official view of Christmas as a rival to the Sabbath… greatly regretted ‘that the day is ordinarily spent so irreverently by those who would observe it, and who would dignify it with the Saviour’s name.’ … That the Presbyterians had made some accommodations to Christmas by mid-nineteenth century is evident from the reminiscences of Robert Blair Risk… in 1912, [who] draws a nostalgic picture of Christmas among the Lancaster County Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in the nineteenth century, who while they restrained themselves from too exuberant a Christmas celebration, had already adopted some of the customs of the Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors.” (Pg. xxi-xxii)
He explains, “In the anglicization process, dialect Christ-kindel became Krist-kingle or Kriss-kingle. And Kriss-kingle, by virtue of a philological law known as progressive assimilation, was altered to Kriss Kringle. This charge was effected, however, not without considerable ‘cussing’ and name-calling. The educated Pennsylvania Dutchman saw RED whenever any writer ‘mutilated’ Christ-kindel to Kriss Kringle. He could partly stomach Kriss-kingle but NOT Kriss Kringle.” (Pg. 35)
This book will be of great interest to those studying the history and development of Christmas in this country.
January 18, 2012
This is an impressive resource or anyone doing research on the traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Consisting of newspaper and magazine articles dating back to the 17th century it is a treasure trove of cultural anthropology.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews