Introduction: Christmas Studies, American Studies, Area Studies

How American is Christmas?That might seem a strange question given that each year from approximately the Autumn Equinox, and certainly from November 1 st , Christmas occupies large swathes of the popular imagination in the US-in ways that also have significant cultural implications for much of the rest of the world.The second that spooky season is over, and frequently before that, Christmas music, movies and television specials dominate the airwaves.The steady, upwards march of Hallmark's Christmas productions -42 original offerings in 2023 alone -and their emulation by other companies like Netflix and Great American Family would suggest that, if anything, the Christmasification of popular culture during the winter months remains a growing trend.One survey in 2018 discovered that around 60 per cent of American households engage in the tradition of watching at least one Christmas movie between Halloween and the New Year, a remarkable unifier (Robinson II et al 2022).Christmas commercialisation also shows no signs of slowing down.In the face of a cost-of-living crisis, rising inflation and high interest rates, Americans set new spending records in the winter of 2022: holiday retail sales reached $936 billion and will soon top a trillion dollars annually.At the same time, there are also signs that the meaning of Christmas in American life continues to shift.A 2021 survey found that four in ten Americans believed that there was a War on Christmas underway in American culture-a paranoid sense of an attempt to remove Christ from the festive season that, in its current iteration, dates back at to the early twenty-first century and was merrily stoked during the Trump years (Robertson).At least according to some sources, the religious sense of the holiday has shifted: between 1995 and 2019, the number of Americans who celebrate Christmas dropped from 96 to 93 per cent, a small but potentially significant downturn.David A. Graham has gone as far as to argue in The Atlantic in December 2022, "Christmas is becoming less of a religious holiday for millions of people.If a war on Christmas exists, it's gaining ground in a long battle of attrition" (Graham 2022).