The Reason For The Season

Daniel Luzer looks at how Hanukkah and Christmas in the US became co-opted by commercialization:

Ashton’s Hanukkah in America: A History explains that by the 19th century “the rising consumer economy and expansion of department stores embraced and promoted the new Christmas customs.” Prior to that time, Christmas celebrations, “where they occurred at all, tended toward ‘carnivalesque’ revelries often involving alcohol consumption and the firing of muskets in the streets, a general rowdiness usually decried by civic and religious elites,” Ashton writes. As the way we celebrate Christmas shifted over time, so too did our celebrations of Hanukkah. In short, they both became more commercial. … Many department store owners realized, correctly, that a gift-based Hanukkah could be very good for business. Only two percent of Americans are Jewish, but many of them settled in cities, where large department stores are easy to find. This meant that they could be a great addition to the market during the Christmas shopping season, so much so that for many gentiles this industry was really their only knowledge of Judaism, at least until relatively recently.