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The Battle for Christmas. By Stephen Nissenbaum. (New York: Knopf, 1996. xiv, 381 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-679-41223-9.)
In a short piece in 1837 on "The Inexhaustibility of the Subject of Christmas," the English poet Leigh Hunt acknowledged the excessive exposure of the holiday: "So many things have been said of late years about Christmas that it is supposed by some there is no saying more. Oh, they of little faith!" With the recent freshet of scholarly attention devoted to ChristmasPenne L. Restad's Christmas in America (1995 ), William B. Waits's The Modern Christmas in America (1993), Daniel Miller's edited collection Unwrapping Christmas(1993), Philip Reed Rulon's anthology Keeping Christmas (1990), J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue's The Making of the Modern Christmas (1986), and Susan G. Davis's...