holidays

This is one of our favorite Christmas-themed posts from the archive.  We hope you don’t mind the re-post!

Stressing remarkable differences between the two, Rachel and Lucy sent in the music videos for the original Mariah Carey version of “All I Want for Christmas is You” (1994) and the re-make (2011).  They suggested that the comparison reveals two trends: the rising emphasis placed on consumption and the new hyper-sexualization.  I figured, “yeah, I’ll bet they’re onto something there.”  And boy were they.

The first video involves Mariah mostly bounding around in the snow in a snow suit. Often acting pretty darn goofy, with dogs and Santa.

She spends part of the video inside with kids, a Christmas tree, presents, and more animals.  She’s usually wearing a sweater.

She spends less than (I’m guessing) 10 seconds of the video in a sexy Mrs. Claus outfit and, when she’s wearing it, it looks like she’s got long johns on her legs.

The new video, featuring Justin Bieber, is wildly different. Instead of a snowy field or an intimate home, the video takes place in a shopping mall.  It centrally features a Nintendo product.

Likewise, instead of bounding around in the snow like a goof, she spends the entire video up against a wall in super high heels and the sexy Mrs. Claus outfit (except this one doesn’t have sleeves or a midriff).

At one point she runs her hand down her body, touching her breast and moving down to her crotch; at another she just leans against the wall with her back to us and swings her butt back and forth.

So there’s one data point, for what it’s worth, but in line with emerging research on and plenty of anecdotal evidence of the “pornification” of American culture.

“All I Want for Christmas is You” (1994):

“All I Want for Christmas is You” (2011):

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

A set of photos, taken by Ian Mansfield, are a neat illustration of how culture can coordinate human action.  They capture London on Christmas morning.  Said Mansfield:

Apart from the emptiness of the city, it is the silence that makes the experience such an addictive one for me.

London is never silent, not even at 3am, but on Xmas morning, it is almost silent. The background drone of aircraft approaching Heathrow has gone, and away from main roads, the streets lack the sound of car tyres rolling over tarmac.

Heading home, also a sound you never really hear now – the pealing of church bells. Not just coming from a single church you are nearby, but from all over the city as the sound carries far further than usual and surrounds you from all sides. Magical.

More at Ian Mansfield’s website (via BoingBoing).

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This is one of our favorite Christmas-themed posts from the archive.  We hope you don’t mind the re-post!

White privilege refers to the many, many benefits of being white in a society dominated, both culturally and materially, by other white people. The notion was popularized by Peggy McIntosh in a 1989 an essay titled White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.  One benefit is that most fictional characters, unless otherwise specified (and sometimes even so), are assumed to be white.  Growing up non-white in a white-dominated world, then, means that  most of the mythological figures of your childhood do not look like you in one important way.

Santa, of course, is a fictional figure whose appearance is invented.  Theoretically anyone could be Santa.  Yet, while we may see the occasional non-white Santa at the mall or in novelty holiday stories, he is unbearably and overwhelmingly white in our (google-able) imagination:  The first three pages of a google image search for “Santa”:

For more examples, see all of our posts about white privilege.  Thanks for Martha Pitts as Ms. for this post idea.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

We’ve posted before about how women are held disproportionately responsible for making holidays happen.  In our imaginations, and all-too-often in real life, the majority of the cleaning, the decorating, the cooking, the gift buying, and the card sending is done by women.

Last year Jeremiah J. sent in a twist on this theme: a CBS report on the First Ladies’ intimate involvement in the decorating of the White House for the holidays. Accordingly to the guest, they are the “commander of chief of Christmas, and they all really care.” Embedding is disabled (watch the video here).

The segment is also a really great example of how women get associated with trivial things. In addition to that stunning line, “commander of chief of Christmas,” the guest explains: “they all have their signature style… it’s really a lot of fun.” Fun, yes, but not by any means important. At the end of the video, the guest is asked if she wrote the book on First Lady involvement with decorating because she wanted ideas for how to decorate her own home. A good sport, the woman replies yes.

This year the White House highlighted Michelle Obama’s role in managing the decorating of the 54 Christmas trees that currently dot the residence.  The story specifies that Ms. Obama had help — 85 volunteers — but also that they were there to help her, specifically, with her job: “…none of this would be possible if not for the volunteers… and Mrs. Obama thanked them in her remarks this afternoon.”

See also: 12 Mums Make the Workload Light, Christmas is Women’s Work, and Holding Women Responsible for the Holidays.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

It’s an American tradition.  In fact, FBI data on background checks suggests that more guns were given as Christmas gifts last year than any previous year (source).  One-and-a-half million background checks were ordered in December 2011, more than any other month in American history.  Data from 2012 shows another uptick.

Notably, these data represent an increase in the number of guns at the same time as we see a decrease in the number of gun owners.  “[F]ewer and fewer people are owning more and more guns,” explained Caroline Brewer, representing the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

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Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

• Demystifying Commodities
• Ritualized Consumption Dances
• The Economy of Christmas
• EBay Transactions on Black Friday 2009 (pictured)
• Discourse and “Doorbuster” Sales

• The Happiest Day of the Year!
• Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner Up in 2011

Some Fun History:

• Thanksgiving: The First TV Dinner
• Suffragettes Delay Thanksgiving Dinner

Cigarette Advertising, on this Holiday:

• The Traditionalization of Tobacco
• Smoke Camels, for your Health, on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, Race, and Gender:

• Holding Women Responsible for Holidays
• Thanksgiving Poca-Hotness (pictured)

Emile Durkheim, founding father of sociology and author of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, would love  the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Consider this excerpt from a British observer, Jonathan Raban, who watched the parade twenty years ago from a window on Central Park West. The parade, he said, was…

…the secular, American descendant of the European Catholic Easter procession in which all the icons and saints’ bones are removed from the churches and carried ceremonially around the town. The baseball hero, the gaseous, rubbery Mickey Mouse, the Mayflower pilgrims were the totems and treasure relics of a culture, as the New Orleans jazz and Sousa marches were its solemn music.

Had a serious-minded Martian been standing at the window, he would have learned a good deal by studying the parade’s idyllic version of American history. [guns, refugees, rebels]… The imaginative life of children was honored to a degree unknown on Mars — which was, perhaps, why matters of fact and matters of fiction were so confusingly jumbled up here, with Santa Claus and George Washington and Superman and Abraham Lincoln all stirred into the same pot.

He would be struck by the extraordinarily mythopoeic character of life in this strange country. People made myths and lived by them with an ease and fertility that would have been the envy of any tribe of Pacific islanders. Sometimes there were big myths that took possession of the whole society, sometimes little ones, casually manufactured, then trusted absolutely.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.