| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elizabeth H. Pleck. Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. ix, 328. Cloth $55.00, paper $22.95.

By relying on a variety of sources more traditionally used by sociologists (folklore, oral histories, and surveys), Elizabeth H. Pleck explores some of the most anticipated holidays and events in the American calendar: Chinese New Year, Easter, Passover, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras, weddings, and funerals. In examining how Americans invented and reinvented a variety of major holidays and life-cycle rituals, Pleck argues that three phases characterize the development of family ritual in the United States. The first phase was the "carnivalesque," a time when the boundaries between public and private, respectable and bawdy, celebration and desecration were blurry. The second phase, which commenced with the Victorian era, was the sentimental. Pleck stresses that the unpaid labor of women—cooking the feasts, cleaning and decorating their homes, shopping for gifts—is one of the central components of sentimental ritual. She also proposes that a third phase, which began in the 1960s and relies on the continued vitality of the sentimental approach to holidays for its existence, is the post-sentimental phase. This third phase is characterized by an abundance of irony, disenchantment, and mass-produced goods and services. . . .

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