| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Karal Ann Marling. Merry Christmas! Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2000. Pp. xiii. 442. $27.50.

Karal Ann Marling's book poses a challenge to historians. The author proposes to collect the "'lost' objects" of the "visual and material culture of Christmas in America" (p. vii), in order to restore them to the "ongoing saga of American life" (p. xii). Presumably, that saga is historical, yet from the very beginning Marling declares her mission "less an effort to plug the contents of the national Christmas stocking into the socket of orthodox historical discourse than it is an attempt to recover the truths inherent in the things themselves" (p. xii). Never describing this orthodoxy (would anyone argue that there is just one?), she loosely bundles together a cornucopia of artifacts, ideas, and images of the American Christmas. . . .

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