’Tis the season.

The season for television shows to chug too much eggnog, forget their earthly cares for an hour or so, and jump the proverbial yuletide shark.

The result, whether it’s treacly sweet, outrageously theatric, or capable of bringing an audience to tears, comes like clockwork each December, when—for good or bad—television cuts away from its regularly scheduled programming to tap into the spirit of the season.

I’m talking stars. I’m talking spectacle. I’m talking, more than likely, somebody dressing up as Santa.

I’m talking, if it’s not clear, about the holiday special.

I grew up with an appreciation for the scripted counterpart of this, the holiday episode—from dinosaurs and cavemen singing along to Christmas carols on The Flintstones to the cast of Community transforming into Claymation toys to the annual Doctor Who drop that had high-school me in an absolute chokehold: Tears (me, at the exit of David Tennant)! Dickens! The better-than-it-should-be Murray Gold novelty song!

But I came of age too late to fully appreciate the shmaltzy old-school celebrity Christmas variety shows of yore (you know the ones, packed with musical numbers, guest stars, dancing, and zany surprises). Over the last few years, though, I’ve found myself actively seeking out the latest generation of these specials. Tuning in to NBC’s “Christmas at Graceland” this year, the first live musical televised holiday special at Presley’s old estate, helped clarify what it was that draws me, and so many others, to them. As Lana Del Rey performed her rendition of the classic 1955 song “Unchained Melody,” an Elvis favorite, I realized that I was witnessing something timeless, something so many of us really do hunger for, especially in these uncertain times.

The holiday special first came on the scene in 1950, another year badly in need of comfort. The world, still recovering from the impact of World War II, was bracing for more conflict; the Korean War had broken out just months earlier, the first major proxy war in the Cold War, and the fighting foreshadowed the long, bloody years ahead. The early holiday special served as a balm of sorts, inviting families to gather together for some seasonal cheer.

Technically 1950 wasn’t the first year Christmas came to television. In America, early offerings, like a 1946 televised “North Pole Toyland” from Wanamaker’s DuMont Studio, showed children playing in “toy world,” carolers singing, and even a Santa workshop (who played Santa in that show is anyone’s guess—1946 was, notably, the first year that male Santas outnumbered female Santas again since before World War II). In 1948, “Surprise From Santa” featured noted stage and screen actor Whitford Kane playing that famous “snowy-bearded gentleman” on television, and debuted a new song, “Sleighbells,” by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. And of course, long before television came around, radio had already set a precedent—was the “ur-Christmas special” really the Royal Christmas message, first delivered in a radio broadcast by George V in 1932?

But 1950 was different. Like the snow falling outside, Christmas blanketed programming. It was, truly, “Christmas on the airwaves” as a New York Times’ television programming guide proclaimed, announcing that “most regularly scheduled programs will abandon their usual formats to bring … viewers programs of a seasonal nature.”

Among the listed specials to be aired on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day: “Herald of Goodwill,” which featured Christmas carols from different nations; “Nativity,” depicting images of Jesus’ birth by master painters; a televised church service; a candlelight mass from the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.; and the first-ever TV adaptation of the Christmas-themed musical Babes in Toyland (which is sadly lost to time).

The biggest splash was “One Hour in Wonderland,” Walt Disney (and his company)’s first real venture into television.

“Fair warning to all mothers and grandmothers preparing dinner for Christmas Day,” wrote L.A. Times critic Walter Ames. “Don’t set your dinner table between the hours of 4 and 5 PM. If you do, the food is liable to get cold.” The reason? That “spectacular” Disney Christmas special he’d seen a preview of, hosted by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, his dummy Charlie McCarthy, and the actress Kathryn Beaumont. The special, sponsored by Coca-Cola, was set up like a Christmas party at the Disney studio. A magic mirror opened the portal into the fantasy of Disney, unlocking previews of Alice in Wonderland (which would hit theaters the following summer), giving airtime to a host of characters from Mickey Mouse to Donald Duck, and behind-the-scenes peeks at Walt Disney Productions.

Just a small percentage of U.S. households even owned a television in 1950 (a 13-inch set cost the equivalent of around $2,000 today). But for those who did tune in, maybe using a screen magnifier to make the tiny black-and-white picture appear a little larger, they were enraptured. The television special garnered an estimated 90% of viewers—and as Richard T. Stanley joked in The Eisenhower Years: A Social History of the 1950s, “possibly helped sell a gazillion Cokes.” The reviews were raves: “After seeing it, I know why television was born,” Hedda Hopper announced in her gossip column that week.

“One Hour in Wonderland” was such a hit that it became an annual tradition, rebranded as “The Walt Disney Christmas Show” the following year with a record television budget of $250,000.

Though the Disney special may have made the most visible impact in 1950, less remembered (perhaps because it aired on NBC a few weeks late) is arguably an even more seminal program that aired that season: the inaugural “Bob Hope Christmas Show.”

“We want you to just get back into the holiday spirit, and imagine you’re back around Christmas time,” joked Hope at the start of the special to set the scene. Guests included film actor Robert Cummings, opera singer Lily Pons, and tap dancer Betty Bruce. There were laughs—like one skit of four department store Santas commuting home on the subway—and there were poignant moments, notably the ending, when Hope brought Eleanor Roosevelt out on stage.

She started by thanking Hope for his recent tour to visit military bases in Korea, Japan, and Alaska.

“When you travel you get a chance to meet and talk to all kinds of people,” Hope commented. He paused a moment before adding, “These days you find many people are confused and more than a little afraid of the future.”

“That’s understandable in times as troubled as ours,” Roosevelt agreed.

It was the first of 44 Christmas shows Hope would film over his lifetime. Other celebrity hosts, from Bing Crosby to Dean Martin and more, followed his playbook to bring a dose of holiday spirit to the season. But by the turn of the century, when Hope’s final special aired in 1994 (the same year that fellow holiday stalwart Perry Como wrapped his last Christmas special), the future of the seasonal variety special seemed up in the air.

Rather than turn into a corny relic from TV’s past, a new wave of specials in the 2000s showed there was something more substantial to the formula. At first, celebrities returned with a bit of a satirical wink: Stephen Colbert for Comedy Central in 2008 or Bill Murray for Netflix in 2015. But in recent years, hosts have cast irony aside in favor of embracing what the holiday special first set out to do. From Lady Gaga and the Muppets to Kacey Musgraves to Mariah Carey (unofficial patron saint of Zócalo Public Square), celebrities are once again finding success by leaning into the shtick of it all.

Like in the earliest days of the holiday special, fewer may be watching now, in this age of streaming. But for those like me who are still tuning in, I suspect, whether or not they celebrate the season, they are watching in search of some age-old winter cheer to help warm up these long winter nights.

The post Why We Hunger for the Holiday Special appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Germany does not have a traditional, centuries-old national holiday, such as July 14 in France or July 4 in the United States.

But Germany is carefully attuned to dates, and how they might be used to reckon with the history of dictatorships, encourage the maintenance of memorial sites, and spark remembrance in ways that draw the public to past sins, and provide vital information and moral orientation.

Reckoning with and making restitution for the Nazi dictatorship of 1933­–1945, World War II, and the deaths and persecution of millions occupies Germany to this day—and probably will forever. The ongoing German work of remembrance around dates also should remind us of how frequently used phrases like “coming to terms with the past” (“Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung”) or “processing the past” constitute a rather helpless vocabulary, and provide only a generalizing veil for specific historical crimes.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the occupying Allies took the first steps to punish those most responsible for the Nazi regime, to reorganize the government, and to begin to compensate the Nazis’ victims. But they did much of this work at a distance. The newly installed powers within Germany, on the other hand, were more entangled in old patterns, and often remained ambivalent about the continuation of denazification and democratization. In any case, the population tended to deny and repress recent crimes and, above all, lament their own victims of the war.

But over many years, beginning in the late 1940s and into the early 21st century, Germany developed a “policy on the past” and established days of remembrance. The process took different paths in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). But everywhere, its influences included court proceedings, historical research, art, and media, as well as political events like the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961­–2, the reunification of Germany in 1990, and debates around the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which opened in 2005.

Over the decades, Germany would come to commemorate a number of dates—not as national holidays but in conjunction with a heterogenous group of organizations and individuals, including government. The shifting commemorations and days include the end of World War II in Europe on May 8, 1945, the anti-Jewish pogroms of November 9, 1938, and the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945.

Beginning in the late 1940s, first the Soviet-occupied zone and then the German Democratic Republic celebrated May 8 as the victory of the USSR and of anti-fascism. But the Western parts of the nation occupied by the U.S. and other Allies didn’t mark the date. In 1965, the Federal Republic of Germany’s government wanted to highlight the 20th anniversary for the first time as a kind of “end of the post-war period,” celebrating successes in reconstruction, consolidated democracy, and the prospect of reunification—but the Allies rejected the idea.

After years of routine events, in 1985, Federal President Richard von Weizsaecker made a speech interpreting May 8, 1945 no longer as a day of military defeat but as the “Day of Liberation.” He received some public criticism, but this statement marked a turning point for May 8. It reduced the attention on Germany’s own post-war grievances, and focused more attention on those whom the Nazi regime had killed and persecuted.

It has taken quite a long time to establish adequate forms and days of recollection for victims of the Nazi regime.

In 1946, the U.S. military took the first steps toward commemorating the Holocaust, remembering the destruction of the synagogue at Frankfurt’s Börneplatz on November 9, 1938. Similar commemorations followed elsewhere, with widespread media coverage throughout Germany (then divided into four zones of Allied occupation) on the 10th anniversary on November 9, 1948. But no centralized events took place.

In the Soviet Occupation Zone (later GDR, or East Germany) a “Day of Anti-Fascism” was set up on the second Sunday of September 1946.  But its strong emphasis on military and political victory soon pushed aside Jews as victims, focusing instead on the deaths of “political” anti-fascists. Meanwhile in the Federal Republic (West Germany), November 9, 1938, would gain greater importance.

Very soon, however, a different and competing line of remembrance was started as a “National Day of Mourning” for all German victims of war, following a tradition which began after World War I. This focus on the fallen soldiers and other war dead remained far removed from the fate of the victims of Nazi dictatorship, and the topics of German guilt and responsibility. Only the states of Hesse and Hamburg dedicated the national day of mourning as a “day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism and the dead of both world wars.” During the 1950s, the victims of the Nazi dictatorship received more attention in commemoration, but the victim community remained tied to the German dead.

Since the early 1950s, Jewish communities in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin have driven initiatives to hold days of remembrance on November 9, along with victims’ organizations and opposition groups. Although the state did not sanction these commemorations, eventually more municipalities took part.

The number of memorial sites to Nazi victims also increased rapidly, especially after a wave of new attacks against synagogues in 1959 and 1960. In the decade leading up to the 40th anniversary of November 9, in 1978, the number of commemorative events increased tenfold. Historical research and publications began to offer in-depth accounts of the anti-Semitic November pogroms of 1938—and of the German population’s widespread acceptance of those attacks.

By the late 1970s, this day of remembrance had been firmly anchored at the national level. The federal president and other representatives of national government and parliament were observing the day, which students also study in school. This movement in turn inspired more local research, media projects, and discussions in small towns and rural areas. The American television series Holocaust, about a fictional Jewish family, also spread interest in the subject after several parts appeared on German television in 1979. The term “holocaust” became part of the German language, thanks to the show.

Today, November 9 has developed into one of the most important days of remembrance, recalling the date when Nazi organizations destroyed synagogues, attacked, killed, or expelled Jews, and deported many to concentration camps. Germans for too long downplayed this series of events as “Reichskristallnacht,” the night of broken glass, which doesn’t acknowledge the full extent of its horrors. The day of commemoration transformed November 9 into a symbol of the horrible path to the “final solution” of annihilation of German and European Jews. Germans, over time, began to understand crime, guilt, and responsibility in their historical and moral dimensions.

Other days of commemoration also advanced this process. The Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation chose a “Week of Brotherhood” in March 1952 to focus solely on commemorating the persecution of the Jews. This week was initially devoted to seeking religiously motivated mutual understanding with the small number of surviving German Jewish citizens. But it expanded over time and contributed significantly to the clarification of historical facts and responsibilities of the Holocaust. More recently, however, the week has lost importance, in part because of the secularization of society.

A different theme concerns July 20, 1944—political resistance against the Nazi regime, remembered through Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. As early as October 1951, the Federal Republic of Germany’s government marked this day—both to honor resistance and to counter accusations of treason by old Nazi supporters and former military personnel. Annual commemorative speeches on July 20 by high state officials, and more recent events that include some military rituals, have achieved considerable media coverage. The commemorations are effective because of the drama of the attempted assassination, and the personal story of the executed assassin, Count Stauffenberg, and his co-conspirators. But they have also come under fire for focusing on military elites rather than the resistance of trade unions, left-wing parties, and everyday people.

Today, the official commemoration day of German state organs, explicitly dedicated to all victims of the National Socialist system of oppression, and especially to the murdered and expelled Jews of Europe, is January 27. That is the day in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. President Roman Herzog first dedicated this day in 1996, and since 2005, it also has been International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each year, the German Bundestag in Berlin holds commemoration events with contemporary witnesses, international experts, and political representatives, including from Israel and neighboring European countries. The state parliaments and governments of Germany, and many local authorities, also follow this practice—implying a political self-commitment of state institutions to permanently respect this occasion and its mandate.

Although November 9 retains its importance, January 27 has become a more powerful commemoration because it was established after German reunification in 1990, and it integrates the very different patterns of memory in West and East Germany.

Today, rising xenophobia, racism, and right-wing extremism are placing new pressures on Germany—and on the contribution remembrance, and days of commemoration, make to society.  Germany’s culture of remembrance may well deliver some relevant lessons and moral enlightenment necessary to secure freedom, democracy, and peace.

Since some right-wing activists quite openly proclaim allegiance to Hitler and Nazi ideology, it is much more necessary to use historical facts and moral arguments in everyday political dispute to counter their horrible beliefs and propaganda. The German pledge “Never again” will be needed on streets, in speeches, and in all kind of media for the foreseeable future.

The post How Germany Developed a ‘Policy on the Past’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The level of stress we feel can be harder to cut than a Butterball turkey: Not only are we homing in on the family dinner table where so much that has determined us has happened, but this Diwali or Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or Christmas feast is a kind of recurring dream (or nightmare, as the case may be). We may not be thinking about it, but we are keeping the dead alive with each family reunion and culinary tradition. We are keeping customs so longstanding that we barely know their origins.

No wonder we feel a little crazy around the holidays.

And we continue to celebrate the pull of family ties even as they unravel, sometimes quite noticeably, all around us. It may seem as if our family identities are experiencing a forced reboot where preferred pronouns, critical race theory debates, and a million other powder kegs threaten to blow up the system—even before the turkey gets carved. We feel our present moment is especially fraught, even though our predecessors sometimes literally stepped through minefields to make their way home to hearth and family, even when it meant sitting across from John Birchers, segregationists, religious bigots, and worse.

Still, this year’s feast may seem like the last straw. Was it ever thus, or have we finally come to the family tipping point? Will this be our last supper before the great cancelling? Knowing the carnage to come, should we even come home at all? Are the ties that bind stronger than the tribalistic othering of our extended family’s persecutions?

Has coming home for the holidays become the definition of craziness?

We are likely to never know our whole family story, and we are probably lucky that we don’t—but it’s all still there underneath the silt of Time, affecting our actions and relationships through the sediment in unexpected ways. We are related to and loved by individuals who have survived wars and other global catastrophes just to get here, who have made choices and espoused beliefs antithetical to everything we care about, who may barely condone our life choices, and yet who share our blood. This is the primordial ooze that glazes our table’s honey-baked ham.

Indeed, we are indentured to family; it’s in the word itself—family. The Latin famulus is a servant or slave, and the historical idea of family goes beyond lineage to estate, property, and the collective value of a domestic household. We may adhere to it or rebel from it, but we will always have its mark on us.

The faddish interest in family trees and finding our roots makes sense, not only in trying to get beyond what we already know of parents and grandparents, but in helping us determine a narrative thread amid what is otherwise a tangle of opposing family values. Sepia photos seem less controversial than the talking heads on Fox or MSNBC. Perhaps genetic ancestry can bring us all together and off the firing line.

DNA may not lie—but what does it all really tell us? What meanings can we cobble together from racial and ethnic percentages on pie charts? What does a ship’s manifest really say about the long-lost antecedent emigrating from pogrom or famine? Perhaps it connects us to world history writ large enough to read in the dark. But the family mystery remains: Who were they really? Would they have understood me? Sure, we’re family, but might we have been friends? And beneath the old-world fashions and foreign names, what secret madness were they hiding?

Out of this fundament of doubt arises the family play. Of course, the genre exists also on film and in novels, but on stage the family play has grown roots so deep that they intertwine with the electrics and the plumbing and threaten to raise the floorboards. It would seem that the theater was made for teasing out the knots of ancestry one sin at a time.

We Americans are particularly good at dramatizing such narrative threads, but we certainly don’t own the rights. The Mahabharata, the immense Sanskrit epic about cousins who go to war over politics, sexism, and immorality penned by Srila Vyasadeva and Ganesha, recounts events from more than 5,000 years ago, 2,500 years before Oedipus Rex appeared. In the intervening millennia we have been inundated with families misbehaving in ways we can’t unsee. But you don’t have to carve your own eyes out of your head to get the underlying point: The families on stage are extreme versions of the ones we go home to.

In this moment of trigger warnings, let it be said that all family plays are triggers and that good plays trigger with intent. They zero in on past trauma and make it present and immediate. They cause a very specific kind of emotional distress: The audience, transported by memory, may find itself unable to remain present in the moment—yet it cannot look away, it cannot press pause.

Birthrights, grudges, feuds, illicit unions, and deeply buried secrets keep us watching even when we don’t want to. According to my mother, my own father sat watching all four acts of Eugene O’Neill’s great mid-century play Long Day’s Journey into Night while obsessively gnawing the skin off the cuticle of his thumb. Did he recognize his own mother in the doomed Mary Tyrone? Did Mary’s doomed son Edmund’s psychic stress reflect his own love/hate relationship to a family torn apart by the American Depression?

I wish I could have asked him. But when I am gnawing at my own thumb while writing my own versions of the family play, I realize that writers are, in a way, cannibals when we attempt to tell the tale of those who came before, tearing at themselves in the piteous search for the narrative thread. Mary Tyrone was not my father’s mother, nor was Edmund my father. Yet somehow, they trod the same narrative path with my father over the same Donner Pass in the dead of bleak midwinter. And watching it made him chew his own flesh.

But it doesn’t always have to be like that. In 1931, Thornton Wilder wrote The Long Christmas Dinner, a play where 90 years go by without a pause in the action. This is a narrative thread on an epic scale yet told in just a few scant minutes. Life courses come and go without fanfare but with love. Characters enter from a portal decorated with fruit and flowers and exit through another hung with black velvet. They age in front of us with little or no physical alteration, and the audience must examine a life span all at once.

The result is funny and tragic, often at the same time. Although no specific dialogue presages the specific rancor of our political tribalism, we get the sense that the holiday table is a place where family unloads upon one another their frustrations and fears—same as it ever was. “Every last twig is wrapped around with ice. You almost never see that,” remarks the unofficial family historian of the play and the character most aware of Time passing, Young Genevieve, not knowing that her mother observed the same thing years before, and that her daughter-in-law will make the same remark years from now at the same table. But, thanks to the telescoped nature of the piece, the audience remembers. They can’t forget, and they wouldn’t want to.

We are all the crazy children of parents too difficult to forget. Nature, nurture, love, damage: It’s all there at the family dinner table, somewhere between the rice and peas and the alcohol, and sometimes it might seem like it’s just too much to bear—especially when the narrative thread gets frayed.

Plays are both prompts and provocations. They point to the madness of our ancestors to help us understand the instabilities of our own lives, tendrils of triggering hostilities growing deep down just under the festive tablecloth. We differ more by degree than kind; we may share DNA or the scars of war, but at least we have perspective, as Shakespeare tells us, “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Whether in the hands of Sophocles, O’Neill, Wilder, or the scores of other playwrights, the family play helps us see that aside from the birthing and the dying, our experiences are not all that different from each other’s. We are all a little crazy and a lot unforgettable. It is quite literally all in the family. The madness is both intrafamilial and interfamilial. Whatever madness awaits you at home for the holidays, not only will you get through it, but you’ll likely see—or have already seen—aspects of it on stage at some point. Perhaps your reflection will help you get through the next meal amongst those who made you what you are.

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The Spanish conquistadors brought the first sheep to North America in the 16th century, when they arrived in present-day New Mexico. Later in the early 17th century, English, Dutch, and Swedish settlers brought sheep to the East Coast, and from there spread to other areas in North America. Initially, sheep met the settlers’ daily and immediate needs for wool to weave into fabric for cold-weather wear, as well as for meat. Sheep were eaten seasonally in the spring and summer on the farms where they were raised. Beyond that there was little or no market for mutton in the United States.

In the early 19th century, sheep farming developed into a larger industry because of an increased demand for wool in both national and international markets. By 1830 the growing wool manufacturing industry became increasingly important for the American economy, which demanded more domestic wool. This consequently resulted in increased meat output, as sheep were slaughtered at the end of their wool-productive life. At that time, the meat industry was locally concentrated where farmers sold these animals seasonally to nearby local butcher shops that supplied the local demand. For many more years, however, meat became a secondary product.

From the 1860s on, as the nation industrialized, urbanized, and grew wealthier amidst a wave of European immigration, demand for mutton rose. Midwestern meatpackers turned this meat into a buffer against periods of meat scarcity. When other meats ran short, meatpackers sent buyers to the western states—including California, Texas, and New Mexico—to secure castrated male sheep for slaughter.

Sheep meat markets developed in major cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Sheep meat was more expensive than other meats and more appealing to the upper classes, so for much of the 19th century mutton or lamb was a rich person’s meal.

In the 1880s and 1890s, young lamb meat gained some popularity as a festive food with upper classes. A young lamb industry, known as a “hothouse,” developed in the East Coast and Midwest. These lambs reached the market by Christmas, and most of them were slaughtered by early spring. It was a prosperous business that remained seasonal.

Greater production reduced some costs and lowered prices, making sheep meat more affordable for low-income households. But beef and pork production also ramped up, and those meats became cheaper, too. Beef sold the best, and large meatpackers who had come to dominate the industry after the development of refrigerated railcars focused on that business.

Americans came to see mutton as an alternative meat, an inferior substitute in times of shortages and disruptions in the beef cattle and pork industries—you ate sheep only when there was nothing else. In popular culture and media, sheep meat was described as unpalatable animal waste. In 1897, a Ranche and Range article stated, “many people settled down to the belief that mutton was poor food.”

Sheep also came to be seen as a meat for immigrants, particularly those from southern and eastern Europe, who were America’s most reliable lamb eaters. American Indian tribes, particularly in Navajo country, also embraced lamb. These social and ethnic associations with sheep meat cemented its outsider status. Meanwhile, the meatpacking industry promoted beef as quintessentially American.

Not all bias against sheep meat was grounded in social prejudice. Some American consumers lost confidence in sheep meat after reports of meatpackers marketing lower-grade mutton and old ewes. Early in the 20th century it also became known that some retail butcher shops sold goat meat as lamb and mutton. Several sheep disease outbreaks made national news during the 1890s and early 1900s, deepening fears about the safety of eating sheep meat.

Americans soon lost not just their taste for sheep meat, but their talent for producing and preparing it. Local butchers did not dress (or gut) the sheep carcasses properly, or use proper mutton-cutting techniques. They did not always remove the red membrane that lines the inner surface of the lamb before cooking it. The waxy, lanolin flavor of this skin—the so-called “caul” or “fell”—may well have been why sheep acquired a reputation for being gamy and having a disagreeable taste.

Prejudice against sheep meat grew so great that it became too hard to change most Americans’ minds. World War I didn’t help. A 1917 “eat-no-lamb” campaign discouraged eating sheep that were needed to make wool. Then, with meat running low, Americans temporarily turned to eating sheep, and they remembered why they hadn’t liked it. Older, mature sheep being slaughtered during the war had a strong flavor and a tough texture.

After the Great War, mutton consumption remained low despite big price drops. Sheep raising became unprofitable for many operators in the West due to both excess supply and very weak demand. By then, the average per capita consumption of sheep meat in the United States was only five pounds per year, versus 67 pounds of beef or 71 pounds of pork.

Woolgrowers, meatpackers, and wholesalers didn’t give up. They started developing campaigns to encourage lamb and mutton consumption. In 1919, the National Woolgrowers Association launched a nationwide campaign to boost sheep meat consumption in the United States (which still persists in some ways) with the slogan “EAT MORE LAMB.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration attempted to help encourage the consumption of lamb and mutton as a means of conserving the available supply of pork and beef.

But 100 years later, none of these efforts have stuck. Since then, throughout the 20th century and into the present, production of sheep meat showed a significant decrease. Such decrease in production has been accompanied by higher prices of this meat responsible for the greater production costs. Overall profitability has been decreasing gradually due to higher production costs. Both high prices and short supply have diminished its consumption and prevented its increase. But also, there is a social sense of rejection toward sheep meat.

Today, sheep consumption tends to be seasonal—with lamb (and occasionally mutton) on American tables during Easter, Christmas, and other significant religious holidays. As the holiday season begins, sheep may be part of your celebrations—perhaps with a roast leg of lamb on your table but just as likely with a pair of wool socks in your pile of gifts.

The post Why Ewe Eat Lamb on Holidays (but Not the Rest of the Year) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Take what’s happening in Southern California: On October 19, 100 container ships were scattered along the shoreline for at least 20 miles as they waited to unload at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

It was an unprecedented logjam. A single ship carrying 19,100 TEU (20-foot equivalent unit) containers can haul 156 million pairs of shoes or 300 million tablet computers or 900 million cans of baked beans. What the nearly half a million containers worth of goods waiting on those ships represent is difficult to even grasp.

The backup—along with similar gum-ups in 77 percent of major ports all over the world—has piled onto ongoing concerns about holiday season shortages, with everything from semiconductors to semisweet chocolate caught up in the predicament. But these shipping delays won’t just impact whether you’ll get your new Xbox—on a larger level, U.S. officials are worried these shortages will affect consumer spending, and in turn, hinder economic recovery.

Because L.A. and Long Beach account for 40 percent of all seaborne imports to the United States, the situation at those ports caught the attention of President Joe Biden and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who quickly announced that both facilities would begin to operate 24 hours per day to ease the congestion.

While this was a positive step, in the long run, it only irons out one kink in a long link. Ultimately a system-wide solution is needed to fix the entire supply chain—the complex web of suppliers, purchasers, and logistics operations that shuttle products around the world, and keep global and local economies humming healthily along.

Many different causes have led us here. The pandemic changed the lifestyle of many Americans, who switched to a hybrid work schedule and started spending more time at home. That fueled surging demand for items like office chairs, printers, gym equipment, and home appliances as consumer demand shifted from service to goods.

But just as demand skyrocketed, COVID-19 related safety policies made it harder for suppliers to deliver stuff where it needed to go. Logistics experts have reported that extensive quarantine requirements and partial port closures in China, along with lockdowns at factories in Indonesia and Vietnam, significantly hampered the production of goods for the U.S. market. Some have also argued that generous pandemic unemployment benefits in the U.S. created reluctance for many Americans to return to logistics-related work, resulting in severe labor shortages among workers at the ports, truck drivers, warehouse operators, and so on.

Complicating the supply situation is the fact that containers needed to ship stuff aren’t in the places they’re needed. Shortages of containers in China have sharply limited the amount of goods that can be shipped to the U.S. Then, when loaded containers do arrive at the port, there is a shortage of chassis available for truckers to use to haul them away. The Biden administration has requested suggestions from a broad range of stakeholders to solve the country’s container and intermodal chassis shortages and alleviate supply chain chokepoints. But even when the container shortage issue is resolved, this won’t be the end of the problem, because there is a shortage of warehouse space in the U.S. for storing these deliveries. In late October, the vacancy rate in the Los Angeles area was a paltry 1 percent; even before the pandemic, in 2019, the vacancy rate was a tight 1.4 percent.

Broken supply chains may slow economic recovery in Asia, Europe, and the United States. In the U.S. particularly, where many self-interested players are involved and the government has no direct control over most of them, it will be a challenge to get everyone on board to solve the crisis. I suggest two short-term approaches:

First, when supply cannot be increased quickly, it makes sense to curb demand—in this case, to try to entice consumers to shift their spending from goods back to services. To achieve this goal, the Biden administration should push faster and harder with vaccination mandates. Safety is a must to get Americans back traveling, dining out, and returning to movies, shows, concerts, and the gym. Once the vaccinated population reaches a critical threshold, the government can partner with service providers to provide incentives to get Americans out of these houses and back enjoying new and improved services again.

Second, many supply shortage issues are caused by a lack of coordination among participants in the supply chain—and some quick fixes can go a long way. Taking warehouse capacity: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on October 21 calling for state agencies to identify land for storing containers now stuck at the ports. This is a good step forward. The government should follow it up by imposing penalties on unclaimed containers, which often sit around because storage and demurrage fees at the yards are too low. As an initial step, the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbor commissions recently approved new fines for containers sitting at the port for more than nine days. The fines will begin at $100 per container, increasing by $100 per day, and provide incentives for retailers to claim containers quickly and get rid of the goods within them via fire sales. This will ensure warehouse vacancy rates increase and make room for new containers to move in and allow normal commerce to resume.

This all leads back to the ports, where container and container chassis shortages are exacerbated when loaded containers lie for days or even weeks, taking up space that needs to be freed for receiving empty containers. Likewise, without newly emptied containers leaving U.S. ports, container shortages escalate in Asia. Once more containers are claimed and emptied at different yards, port operators, trucking companies and warehouse owners will be able to coordinate operations so that truckers can drop off the empty containers and pick up loaded ones in a single trip. With operations synchronized, more containers will be cleared from the port, making rooms for arriving ships to unload.

These fast and simple solutions could help ensure that merchandise such as toys, shoes, game consoles, and holiday decorations will arrive at stores sooner—and hopefully, before the holiday season. However, even though temporary fixes may tie us over for this holiday season, we need to plan for the future. Any long-term supply chain solution must involve a thorough review of the entire physical and information infrastructure.

The post Breaking Down the Supply Chain Breakdown appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Cynics may dismiss these memories as mere reflections of cold retail strategies. But for Chicagoans, the emotional connections are real, as they are for shoppers across the country who cherished the family-owned department stores that anchored their downtowns. Bostonians had Filene’s. Atlantans had Rich’s. Detroiters had Hudson’s. Clevelanders had Halle’s. Philadelphians had Wanamaker’s. Though conceived primarily as commercial centers, they evolved into larger institutions of American life—places where families of various castes and classes were welcome to take in the spectacle of services and goods, no admission fee required.

No time was this truer than the holiday season. And before the age of online shopping and franchise-heavy megamalls sent them to their demise (Marshall Field’s, for one, was converted into a Macy’s), these stores held a significant place in our collective Christmas memories.

But how did these houses of retail come to inspire such fond feelings?

Marshall Field’s in 1949.

That’s the question that I, as a historian, became fascinated by growing up in Chicago, where Marshall Field’s was as much a part of the soul of the city as our Lakefront or our Cubs. As a child, I would meet my grandmother under the famous clock at State Street and Washington Boulevard, and head up to the Walnut Room for lunch with my grandfather, who worked at Field’s as the buyer for the linen department for 25 years. When the change to Macy’s was announced, protestors gathered under the clock with signs reading “Field’s is Chicago—Boycott Macy’s.” They have been picketing there every fall since 2005. This year’s signs read, “If the Cubs can win the World Series, Marshall Field’s can come back to Chicago.”

Christmas wasn’t much of a holiday anywhere in America when Potter Palmer arrived in Chicago in 1852 and opened a dry goods store. By the turn of the century his successors, Marshall Field and Levi Leiter (and later just the now-eponymous Field) had built it into the premiere department store in the Midwest, known for impeccable customer care, generous return policies, quality merchandise, and a vast array of services (from tea rooms to relaxation rooms, shoe repair to hotel bookings—all of which kept shoppers in the building and reaching for their wallets).

Christmas, however, had received only modest attention. The store eventually began advertising Christmas cards and gift merchandise, and in 1885, they opened a seasonal toy department (which later became year-round). The first mention of holiday decorations at Marshall Field and Company came in 1907. The store had just opened in a monumental new building featuring the Walnut Room, and restaurant employees reportedly put up a small Christmas tree.

Marshall Field’s at Christmas in 2005, the last year before it was rebranded as a Macy’s.

By 1934, the tree stood 25 feet high. By mid-century, Field’s laid claim to the world’s largest indoor Christmas conifer: a 45-foot evergreen hoisted atop the Walnut Room’s drained fountain. It took 18 decorators and three-story-high scaffolding to trim the live evergreen. To kids, it looked like it stretched all the way up to the sky.

Through the decades, department stores like Marshall Field’s employed ever more elaborate strategies to lure shoppers. As the smell of Mrs. Herring’s Chicken Pot Pie wafted from the Walnut Room, massive “ice” reindeer soared over displays, oversized candy canes and evergreen garlands wound down the aisles, and giant stars and mega snowflakes floated in the skylight. In dizzying displays of holiday spirit, Field’s insides conveyed top-to-bottom Yuletide joy.

And then there were the Marshall Field’s gift boxes. Each one bore the elegant calligraphy of the company name, signaling that the gift inside was worth savoring. It was not unheard of for gift-givers to repurpose the notoriously sturdy containers, packing them with “imposter” goods from other stores, both out of frugality and in an effort to impart that ineffable Field’s glow.

Crowds in front of Marshall Field’s in 2005.

Field’s had good reason to continue these traditions. But their real power came from transcending their original commercial purpose. For many Chicagoans, Marshall Field’s at Christmas was transformed from a wonderfully stocked department store into a near-sacred family ritual.

None of these rituals was more legend than the holiday windows.

In 1910, thanks to improved glass manufacturing that could create massive transparent panels, stores across the U.S. began mounting elaborate window displays, and efforts quickly escalated as they became a powerful lure for shoppers.

Marshall Field’s inventive window designer, Arthur Fraser, used the big corner window at Washington Boulevard to showcase holiday gift merchandise. His first panel featured animated carousels and gift-ready toy trains. But in 1944 the store’s new stylist, John Moss, ditched the hard sell in favor of narrative windows—recreating Clement Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas. The story panels were such a hit they were repeated the next year.

Soon a new holiday window trend took hold: store-specific mascots. Montgomery Ward’s claimed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Wieboldt’s concocted the Cinnamon Bear. Not to be outdone, one of Moss’s co-designers, Joanna Osborn, conjured Uncle Mistletoe, a plump, Dickens-like figure decked out in a red great-coat and black top hat. With white wings, he flew around the world, teaching children the importance of kindness at Christmas.

The first window displays of Uncle Mistletoe went up in 1946 in a series titled A Christmas Dream, which featured the generous old man bringing a young boy and girl to the North Pole to visit Santa. In 1948, Uncle Mistletoe got some company in the form of Aunt Holly, and the pair became a merchandizing bonanza. Over the years, shoppers could buy dolls, books, ornaments, coloring sets, molded candles, cocktail napkins, hot pads, puppets, glassware, and even used window props.

Protestors in front of the recently rebranded Macy’s on Chicago’s State Street, formerly Marshall Field’s, in 2006.

As time went on, Field’s window decorators mastered the art of fake snow (a combination of kosher salt and ground-up glass) and detailed animatronic antics. I remember when the windows had a Nutcracker theme. Below the big scenes depicting the main store were tiny windows where tiny mice figurines were enacting their own delightful version of the story.

At their peak, planning and designing the annual displays began more than a year in advance, with an eager public waiting every November for the reveal of each new theme. Tens of thousands of fans made pilgrimages from Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to crowd around the earnest State Street displays in childlike awe.

There was a marketing aspect to the windows, of course. Delighted viewers, suffused with the seasonal spirit, would hopefully pop inside to shop. But there was no commerce in the displays themselves. Like many of the holiday creations inside, people became attached to the spirit, not the sales. The store’s brand became more than just the goods it sold, which ebbed and flowed over the years. For generations of Chicago families, Marshall Field’s simply inspired Christmas cheer.

The post For Generations of Chicagoans, Marshall Field’s Meant Business—and Christmas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Galveston changed that.

We arrived from a small city in what Texans call “Deep East Texas,” where, as journalists, we’d witnessed hate crimes and covered both the murder of a black man at the hands of police officers and black riots protesting police violence.

What struck me immediately in Galveston was the warmth extended to us. Juneteenth played a central part in that. We were invited to first one Juneteenth event and then another. Hymns were sung, re-enactments were performed. We welcomed this community embrace with no small degree of relief. We felt we’d come home, a feeling intertwined with a holiday we were just beginning to understand.

We’re an interracial couple; I’m of African descent, and my husband is of European descent. I try not to place us in categories now, but that’s how we saw race then and how some people still see it. In our new home, we felt it was important to stand up for the rights of people of color, especially people of African descent. We wanted—for ourselves and our young son—to make our city and country a better place to live. We set about doing that as best we could, in our respective jobs, he as a newspaper editor and I as a college instructor, and in our quest to know this unique holiday.

Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in North America. While it’s true that enslaved people were ostensibly freed in the U.S. by the Emancipation Proclamation, signed in 1863, the order could not be enforced until the Confederate armies were defeated. Texas was on the frontier in those days, and thus the last bastion of slavery. The Union Army—Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and troops—arrived only in June 1865.

The crowd gathers for photos of the Juneteenth historical marker in Galveston, Texas in 2014. It was placed at the site of where the Osterman Building, the Union Army headquarters, once stood.

On June 19, General Order No. 3 was read aloud in Galveston. (According to one of several competing local traditions, this was at Ashton Villa, a home built by slaves.) “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States all slaves are free,” the order announced. “This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.”

The news set off joyous street celebrations, and every year since, on June 19, in Galveston—and increasingly other parts of the U.S.—people have recognized the importance of this day, with picnics, prayers, pageants, and parades.

So, what would my role be in observing this holiday? I thought of the tragedies and soul-wrenching challenges my own relatives experienced during the brutality and the violence of slavery and Jim Crow. A great uncle of mine was murdered in Skokie, Illinois. A grandfather was murdered by a white store clerk in Tennessee; my great grandmother was murdered as well.

These blows weakened our family’s ability to survive, our very foundation of economic and emotional support. Countless others suffered similar losses.

The murders of my father’s father and father’s grandmother are part of a complicated history for African Americans. Though Granger’s order inaugurated a different relationship between the formerly enslaved and former white slave owners, many African Americans, such as my grandfather and great grandmother, did not benefit from a new social and economic order.

Throughout Texas and the South, many were not paid a fair wage for their work. Many were killed or unfairly deprived of opportunities. As a result, many of their descendants have struggled.

A Juneteenth celebration in Texas in 1900.

The lingering effects of slavery may be a reality Americans don’t want to face. But they are part of our American history, as well as part of my family history. I shared them with my husband, and he comforted me when I tried to write about them. Gradually it dawned on him, too, how important it was to celebrate Juneteenth. Juneteenth is a time for acknowledging loss—and a time for mutual support among those who have suffered the same. It’s a time for observing a momentous change, celebrating our survival against some tough odds, and looking ahead to further change.

From the very first time my husband and I held hands with other citizens in Galveston during a Juneteenth prayer circle, we were all hoping for a better day.

My husband began to write editorials for the local newspaper advocating that Juneteenth receive formal national recognition—it’s been a state holiday in Texas since 1980—not as a paid holiday, but a day of observance.

Last year, Galveston marked the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth with a reenactment of the delivery of General Order No. 3 as well as honors for Jack Johnson, a Galveston-born world champion boxer. Many of the observations are held at the Old Central Cultural Center, the site of the state’s first African American high school, which opened its doors in 1885. At that time people of color came from Louisiana to get an education for their children, not possible in their own state.

Meanwhile, Galvestonians involved in Juneteenth—including a former city manager and the founder of the local African American Museum—are advocating for the idea that the time is right for the Juneteenth holiday to receive national recognition. The ongoing struggle for human rights and civil rights requires persistence and courage. Juneteenth is a story that has its own context: It celebrates how far we’ve come and recognizes how far we still have to go.

The post In the Birthplace of Juneteenth, I Learned the Value of the Holiday appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Östanfors, an old miners’ district in the town of Falun, Sweden, has a longstanding tradition of moving Old Saint Nick from house to house each day in December, so every family has a chance to “host” him. This means creating an elaborate Christmas-themed display in the front window. During this public advent calendar across our quarters, figurines of Santa and other seasonal characters like angels and reindeer find themselves in cotton-ball saunas, mock elections, even surrounded by festive guinea pigs. Host families open their doors on their special day to invite in friends, neighbors, and strangers for food and drink.

The intimacy of this ritual makes this one of my favorite times of the year. But out beyond Östanfors, it’s hard to ignore the claims of what I’ll call the Santa Industrial Complex. Countries around the world have clamored to fête themselves as the true home of Kris Kringle, so that they can steal a spot in the global cultural spotlight—and attract tourists. I can’t help but think that, in trying to pin down Santa in real life, a bit of the magic is lost in the process.

For centuries, Santa’s whereabouts were as unclear as they were legendary. He flew down to deliver gifts from the North Pole, and everyone left it at that. The mystery allowed countries to diversify his identity; Santa could look and act however different cultures wanted him to. He appeared as a black man in Amsterdam, a benevolent bishop in Munich, a pagan winter gnome in Finland’s Lapland. In Switzerland, where I was born, he visited homes every year on December 6 followed by a menacing figure called “Schmutzli” (the Swiss version of Krampus). There was little tension between these beliefs, because they existed so far apart from each other.

But today, it’s difficult for things to be so distinct. The Scandinavian-American artist Haddon Sundblom’s 1920s illustrations of a corpulent, jolly Santa drinking Coca-Cola pulled together pre-Christian winter traditions and the Catholic legend of a famous bishop and launched a global template for Saint Nick, which now even reaches predominantly Muslim countries. (I recently discovered no less than 50 portly Santa figures in a hotel lobby in Egypt.) Sundblom’s Santa still appears on Coke cans across the globe at this time of year.

So given Santa’s rising familiarity and Nordic countries’ proximity to the North Pole, why wouldn’t each of them lay some claim to hosting the jolly man? In the 1960s, Denmark launched the ongoing Scandinavian battle over Santa’s true home by moving it from the North Pole down to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital city, to make the global hero a Dane (Greenland was a province of Denmark at the time) and to promote tourism on the sparsely populated island. A gigantic mailbox was put up, inviting children from across the world to send their wish list to “Santa Claus, 2412 Nuuk, Greenland.”

After the mailbox was created, several employees of the Greenlandic postal service began to devote most of their working hours to answer the more than 100,000 letters the box receives every December. But one unfortunate consequence of trying to bring a fantasy story into reality is that reality sometimes butts in. As Greenland has become a quasi-independent state, local authorities have decided to cut all subsidies for this invention by the former colonial power. The consequence: Last year more than half of the letters to Santa never got a response.

Norway created its own famous destination of letters: the “Julehus” (Christmas Home), in the village of Drobaek, just south of Oslo. Around 1850, merchants from around the country started paying visits to a picturesque prayer house in the village, which adorned itself with increasingly elaborate decorations during the holiday season. Soon, past visitors began to send their children’s wish-list letters to the owners. Today, the house, now a museum, displays more than 250,000 such letters from across the world. However, as most children (and many of their parents) no longer know what a real stamp is, incoming wish lists have become rather rare, leaving the Norwegian Santa mostly unemployed.

Neither the Swedes nor Finns want to risk falling out of relevance in the same way, so they have invested in even more concrete Christmas infrastructures. Not far from my town in Sweden, a city called Mora decided in the 1980s to establish “Santa Town” (Tomteland), a small village on the shores of Lake Siljan. Here, too, the strains of reality on fiction are visible. First of all, local legend wants us to believe that Santa and Rudolf arrived in the town on a meteorite 377 million years ago. And while the town is full of Christmas workshops and cozy, open-fire houses for figures like dwarfs and trolls, a nearby failing ski resort has also had to become the home of several hundred Syrian refugees.

Further north, in 1998, Finland built an underground Santa cavern, meant to emulate the legend’s mythic abode in the region. Located near the city of Rovaniemi, on the Artic Circle, the “Santa Park” has everything from traditional Santa buildings to wild amusement park rides. It’s situated just a few kilometers away from Rovaniemi International Airport—nowadays called the “Official Santa Claus Airport”—which over the last decade would bring in more than 600 flights filled with Santa tourists each December. But recently, warmer weather has ruined its sleigh rides, and the economic crisis throughout Europe has kept visitors away.

Given all the holes that reality is poking in these fairytales, maybe countries should give up the idea of owning the “only real Santa,” as several national tourist agencies have claimed. Maybe it’s time to go back to a “democratic” Santa, for and by the people, whose story can be told in any way a group of people choose. That’s a big part of the magic of holiday legends, after all, isn’t it? The Santa displays in my neighborhood, for instance, are only at the mercy of our individual taste in decorations (and jokes). They’re never canceled because of political trends or global economic cycles.

If we want a modern spin, maybe we should just think of Santa now the way we think of him on the Internet. Santa is everywhere and nowhere—and there’s little need for reality to change the narrative.

The post Where Does Santa Call Ho-Ho-Home? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The holiday may have had an easy birth, but not an easy transition to maturity.

Anna Jarvis designed the Mother’s Day celebration in honor of her own mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis. As a young girl, she was inspired by a prayer she once overhead her mother give. “I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mother’s day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life,” Jarvis remembered her mother saying. “She is entitled to it.” Jarvis chose the second Sunday in May to mark the anniversary of her mother’s death and selected Mrs. Jarvis’ favorite flower, the white carnation, as the holiday’s official emblem. Jarvis’ request for children to visit or write letters home on Mother’s Day reflected the significance she placed on her own correspondence with her mother.

As a single woman in her 40s, Jarvis viewed motherhood simply through the eyes of a daughter. Thus she constructed a child-centered celebration of motherhood for Mother’s Day: a “thank-offering” from sons and daughters and the nation “for the blessing of good homes.” “This is not a celebration of maudlin sentiment. It is one of practical benefit and patriotism, emphasizing the home as the highest inspiration of our individual and national lives.”

Commercial industries quickly recognized the marketability in Jarvis’ sentimental celebration of motherhood. Her themes became central to Mother’s Day advertising campaigns. The call to write tribute letters fueled the greeting card industry. The designation of the white carnation emblem energized the floral industry. Moreover, Jarvis’ own story as a daughter dedicated to fulfilling her departed mother’s greatest wish was better than anything a copywriter could invent.

A Mother’s Day card from 1930, with an illustration of a woman dressed in 1860s-era fashion.

But despite her calls to the nation to adopt her holiday, Jarvis considered it her intellectual and legal property, and not part of the public domain. She wished for Mother’s Day to remain a “holy day,” to remind us of our neglect of “the mother of quiet grace” who put the needs of her children before her own. She never intended for the observance to become the “burdensome, wasteful, expensive gift-day” that other holidays had become by the early 20th century.

Jarvis’ attacks on the commercialization of Mother’s Day became legendary. Media sources chronicled her frequent public condemnations of those she denounced as copyright infringers, trade vandals, and blatant profiteers. In 1922, Jarvis endorsed an open boycott against the florists who raised the price of white carnations every May. The following year, she crashed a retail confectioner convention to protest the industry’s economic gouging of the day. In 1925, she interrupted a national convention of the American War Mothers in Philadelphia because she believed the majority of the money raised by the organization’s white carnation sales went into the pockets of professional organizers rather than going to aid World War I veterans.

Jarvis identified several diverse threats to her holiday movement throughout her career. But the biggest was another holiday: a more inclusive Parents’ Day. In 1923, New York City philanthropist Robert Spero attempted to organize a large Mother’s Day celebration, complete with a parade of marching bands and singing troops of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Jarvis, however, would not permit it.

Jarvis had battled with Spero before over his role in the profitable marketing of artificial white carnations. Now she accused him of falsely claiming affiliation with her incorporated Mother’s Day International Association for sheer self-promotion. She threatened a lawsuit, and New York Governor Alfred Smith, who had originally supported the idea, successfully pressured Spero to cancel his entire holiday plans.

In 1924, Spero sponsored his first Parents’ Day celebration on the second Sunday in May. His rallies earned more holiday converts and media attention as the decade progressed. “We want fathers to feel they are more than breadwinners, that when they go off to work they have some responsibility for what goes on in the home,” Spero told The New York Times in 1926. That same year, a crowd of 4,000 attended the Parents’ Day rally in the Bronx. The holiday movement gained momentum with the 1929 official endorsement of Parents magazine publisher George Hecht. And in 1930, New York Assemblyman Julius Berg introduced a bill in Albany to legally replace Mother’s Day with Parents’ Day on the state calendar. He was confident that New York State mothers would have no complaints about sharing their day with fathers.

But Jarvis complained, vehemently. Not only did she consider the bill a personal attack on her legal copyright protection; she saw it as a patent insult to the state’s mothers. “Of all the freak and amazing attacks on the home and respected womanhood of New York State, surely this anti-mother bill sponsored by a little clique of anti- mother sons is a humiliating one,” she protested. For Jarvis, a threat to Mother’s Day was an affront to motherhood and, in turn, to family harmony. Although often criticized by her more feminist contemporaries, as well as modern scholars, for her failure to acknowledge mothers who were active in the era’s social and political reform movements, Jarvis never faltered from her defense of a mother’s preeminent role within the family.

Jarvis was not alone in her criticism of the Parents’ Day movement and its perceived attack on the veneration of motherhood. The state and national success that Spero predicted for his holiday never materialized. His annual rallies were never as well attended as predicted. Berg’s bill failed repeatedly in Albany. And even Hecht abandoned the holiday movement in 1941 to chair the newly incorporated National Committee on the Observance of Mother’s Day.

The holiday rivalry, at its heart, was a societal dispute over the shifting roles of fathers and mothers within the early-20th-century American family. Child care advice and popular culture encouraged fathers to play an active role in the daily lives of their children by the 1930s, calling fatherhood the most important occupation a man could hold. Yet despite the new views on fatherhood, Spero still failed to kick the mother out of Mother’s Day. Perhaps the holiday’s lack of broad appeal mirrored the larger cultural recognition of the unequal division of child care—that when contemporary child care experts or social pundits addressed “parents,” they were still really addressing mothers. Although many Americans certainly believed that fathers deserved regard beyond that of breadwinner, most hesitated to equate the maternal and paternal roles. Like Jarvis, they may have viewed a mother’s influence as irreplaceable and thus incomparable to a father’s role in design or status. Ultimately, Americans opted to honor fathers in a way that did not threaten the status of mothers or marginalize their role as children’s primary care takers. As the Parents’ Day movement faded in the 1940s, the celebration of Father’s Day grew in popularity.

On a national calendar already crowded with tributes to American fathers–from Presidents’ Day to our “pilgrim fathers” on Thanksgiving–Mother’s Day is the only culturally, commercially popular holiday that explicitly celebrates women. And that explains Jarvis’ protectiveness: “When a son or daughter cannot endure the name ‘mother’ for a single day of the year it would seem there is something wrong,” she implored. “One day out of all the ages, and one day out of all the year to bear the name ‘mother’ is surely not too much for her.” Based on the cultural longevity of Mother’s Day, Americans agree.

The post The Tenacious Woman Who Helped Deliver Mother’s Day to the U.S. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Corporate advertisers treat it as the de facto Mexican Day, if not Latino Day, in this country. In 1998, the United States Post Office issued a Cinco de Mayo stamp featuring two folklórico dancers. In 2005, Congress passed a resolution making Cinco de Mayo an official national holiday to celebrate Mexican-American heritage. And it’s customary for presidents to celebrate Cinco de Mayo on the White House lawn with margaritas flowing, mariachi music playing, and dancers in brightly colored traditional costumes.

Don’t they all know that Mexican Independence Day is actually September 16?

Growing up in rural Zacatecas, Mexico, in the early 1970s, holidays and festivities were big community-building affairs. I attended fiestas with tamborazo-style band music, rodeos with churros showing off their roping and riding skills, and the religious procession honoring the town’s patron saint. What I remember most, though, was El Grito, the traditional cry of “Viva Mexico!” to commemorate Mexico’s independence from Spain on September 16. Like Christmas, the holiday is celebrated on the eve of the big day, and the day itself. But I have no memory of Cinco de Mayo, at least not before migrating to the United States.

It was in my elementary school’s bilingual education classroom in Ventura, California, that I first learned about the holiday, which had been incorporated into lesson plans and school assemblies on cultural diversity. In high schools at the time, Mexican-American students began organizing their own Cinco de Mayo celebrations to show off their cultural pride and make a public claim of belonging.

But what does Cinco de Mayo commemorate originally? It is indeed a holiday in Mexico, to be clear, but a lesser holiday not associated with any particular form of revelry. It is the anniversary of the famous battle of Puebla, in which Mexican liberal forces defeated an occupying French army and its Mexican conservative allies during one of Mexico’s serial 19th-century civil wars. By helping to impose an unemployed Hapsburg prince as Mexican emperor, the French were hoping to gain a new beachhead in the Americas while the U.S. was distracted with its own epic civil war.

There are a number of competing (but not mutually exclusive) theories as to why this, of all Mexican holidays, was the one to stand out on this side of the border, in the face of ostensibly stronger contenders. One theory is that it would have been awkward for Mexicans in the U.S. to be too eager to celebrate the official independence day of another country. The generations of Mexican immigrants who came to America weren’t necessarily on best terms with the authoritarian Mexican governments of yesteryear, and weren’t keen to celebrate as if they were those governments’ blind followers. Better to select a different one: Cinco de Mayo.

There is an additional, more prosaic, explanation for Cinco de Mayo’s stature on this side of the border—and that is the fact that it is a more convenient time for migrant farmworkers to celebrate, as was driven home to me when I did doctoral research on the holiday’s popularity—going strong since 1923—in Corona, California.

The Southern California town once known as the “Lemon Capital of the World” was one of the earliest to celebrate Cinco de Mayo in the U.S. Mexican workers made up the majority of the labor force working in the 2,000 acres of lemon groves, 11 packinghouses, and lemon processing plant in 1930s Corona. Lemons were grown in winter months but harvested in springtime, just in time for Cinco de Mayo. The timing of the lemon harvest made Cinco de Mayo a well timed holiday, when people would welcome a reason to rest and celebrate and have a little more disposable income than usual, not to mention ideal weather. When May 5 fell on a weekday, employers paid workers early, and students were dismissed from class early to attend the festivities. As early as 1939, the Los Angeles Times reported, “All work in the citrus industry was suspended for the Cinco de Mayo holiday and several thousand persons came to participate in the celebration.”

Corona is typical of other agricultural communities in California that rely on Mexican farm labor during harvest time, where Cinco de Mayo became an entrenched holiday both because of what it represented and when it fell on the calendar. For example, La Habra’s Spring Citrus Fair incorporates a full day of Cinco de Mayo activities, and thousands attend the Fallbrook Avocado festival during harvest season to sample delicious guacamole and attend Cinco de Mayo festivities.

Corona’s Cinco de Mayo celebration—which continues to this day—has long sought to keep its events local, intimate, and inclusive. The morning parade still features local heroes and role models as grand marshals—for instance, the mother of a World War II hero killed in action or a Latina superior court judge—rather than outside celebrities. The town limits sponsors to local businesses and nonprofit organizations, continuing the spirit of the late 1940s, when the holiday was used to raise money to finance the first youth community center that later became the Corona Boys and Girls Club, which provided recreation programs for kids and teenagers. Proceeds from the celebration provide college scholarships to local Latino high school students. The crowning of the Cinco de Mayo Queen is not simply a beauty contest, but a way to encourage young Latinas to gain public speaking skills, gain confidence, and take on a leadership role in their communities. When organizers had trouble raising funds during the recent recession, the city stepped in to make it an official civic event—fully incorporating the Mexican holiday into American public life.

There is no beer or alcohol sponsorship of Corona’s Cinco de Mayo, even though you can’t talk about the popularity of the holiday everywhere else without talking about the other Corona. The corporate marketplace started pushing Cinco de Mayo as a day-long happy hour when we’re all supposed to down cervezas and margaritas when it recognized the demographic growth of the Latino population in the 1980s. Corporations thought that advertising, sponsorship, and promotion of Cinco de Mayo events would enable them to tap into that young consumer market. Beer and alcohol companies led the charge by spending millions on marketing the holiday. Corona Extra (the beer—no relation to the town) alone spent $91 million in 2013, according to Kantar Media, advertising around the holiday in both Spanish and English, calling itself “the original party beer of Cinco de Mayo.”

I don’t think that means there were kegs on the battlefield in Puebla, but it’s an amusing image. So go have a drink on Cinco de Mayo. But when you do, take a moment to reflect on the evolution of this holiday that commemorates the Americanization of a Mexican diaspora eager to assert its own identity—and, increasingly, the Mexicanization of mainstream U.S. culture as well. ¡Salud!

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