The public work of Christmas : difference and belonging in multicultural societies / edited by Pamela E. Klassen and Monique Scheer.

Includes bibliographies and index.

The difference that Christmas makes : thoughts on Christian affordances in multicultural societies / Pamela E. Klassen and Monique Scheer -- Tense holidays : approaching Christmas through conflict / Monique Scheer -- "And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the noise! noise! noise! noise!" or how the Grinch heard Christmas / Isaac Weiner -- "Stille nacht" time and again : Christmas songs and feelings / Juliane Brauer -- Situating German Volkskunde's Christmas : reflections on spatial and historical constructions / Christian Marchetti -- "The first 'white' Xmas" : settler multiculturalism, Nisga'a hospitality, and ceremonial sovereignty on the Pacific Northwest Coast / Pamela E. Klassen -- Oy Tannenbaum, Oy Tannenbaum! : the role of a Christmas tree in a Jewish museum / Yaniv Feller -- "What exactly do you celebrate at Christmas?" : different perceptions of Christmas among German-Turkish families in Berlin / Sophie Reimers -- A Christmas crisis : lessons from a Canadian public school's seasonal skirmish / Helen Mo -- Christmas on Orchard Road in Singapore : celebrating the gift of Jesus Christ between Gucci and Tiffany / Katja Rakow -- A cathedral is not just for Christmas : civic Christianity in the multicultural city / Simon Coleman, Marion Bowman, and Tiina Sepp -- Epilogue : containing the world in the Christmas mood / Hermann Bausinger.

"Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility. The Public Work of Christmas takes a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism, Christianity, and the nationalizing and racializing of religion. The essays gathered here examine how cathedrals, banquets, and carols serve as infrastructures of memory that hold up Christmas as a civic, yet unavoidably Christian holiday. At the same time, the authors show how the public work of Christmas depends on cultural forms that mark, mask, and resist the ongoing power of Christianity in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike. Legislated into paid holidays and commodified into marketplaces, Christmas has arguably become more cultural than religious, making ever wider both its audience and those who do the work to make it happen every year. The Public Work of Christmas articulates a fresh reading of Christmas--as fantasy, ethos, consumable product, site of memory, and terrain for the revival of exclusionary visions of nation and whiteness--at a time of renewed attention to the fragility of belonging in diverse societies."--

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