Christmas Song Urbanism
Nostalgia for America's older ways
A couple of years ago I wrote an article called “The Christmas Song Guide to Urban Design.” I’ve quoted it here at the newsletter before, but I really like it, and most of you have not seen it, so I’m going to draw on it again.
The gist of that piece was that while America in the middle of the 20th century was rapidly suburbanizing, the Christmas songs from that era still described the older America of cities, towns, and villages.
Nate Hood in Strong Towns observed that nobody takes wedding photos in the suburbs (except him):
We had this simple idea: to capture the ambiance of the American subdivision.
I take it back. That wasn’t our goal. We wanted to take some engagement photos with my sister-in-law who occasionally moonlights as a wedding photography. On a pleasant autumn weekend, we rushed around to various locations trying to find a nice place to take a photo. In doing so, we realized that we were only capturing two extremes; natural beauty and urban landscapes. It struck us that nearly everyone taking engagement photos uses these locations, and rarely anything in between.
Engagement photos are either urban or rural. They are either a former factory or a leafy meadow, the brick wall of a forgotten factory or an empty beach. Never the subdivision. Never the cul-de-sac. We thought we would have a little fun with the premise.
Nobody really writes Christmas songs about the suburbs either. Or makes Christmas movies about them. Even today, when so much of the country is thoroughly suburban, portrayals of suburbia are often ironic or humorous in some way (think, for example, of Jingle All the Way).
If you watch the Hallmark channel or listen to the radio at Christmastime, you’d think the United States was still a country of real towns and cities on the one hand, and rural places on the other.
If we love our suburban lifestyle so much, why does that old, nostalgic portrayal of urban and small-town America still have so much power? Fewer and fewer people alive today have ever even seen a 5-and-10, yet there it is year after year in “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas.” The little town described in that song has a “grand hotel,” most of which have now been replaced by chain hotels out by the Interstate exit. Most of “Frosty the Snowman” takes place not in the backyards, but in the village, complete with a square.
You see the point.
Here’s some of what I wrote in that original piece:
This time taking a look at what these songs reveal about the physical form of the houses and neighborhoods in which they take place. There is a long association of Christmas with traditional land-use patterns and neighborhoods, as the “Christmas village” home décor phenomenon shows. Nonetheless, it would not be possible today, in the vast majority of American locales, to build a neighborhood resembling a tabletop Christmas village display. These evocations, which are also present in the popular Christmas song canon, are part myth, part aspiration, and part a real description of how midcentury America was physically and architecturally laid out on the ground.
However, there was also suburban aspiration woven in. Take “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”:
These lines inadvertently reveal that the child dreaming of a hippo for Christmas lives in a house with both two stories and a two-car garage. Most houses in 1953, to put it simply, did not have two stories and a two-car garage. And many Americans did, and do, not live in houses at all. No Christmas song that I am aware of takes place in an apartment building. This is curious, especially given the quasi-urban setting of so many Christmas classics.
While the portrayals of homes may have hinted at detached houses and homeownership, the overall picture of land use is an urban one:
Despite our enthusiasm for the mobility unlocked by the automobile, the near-total absence of the car from cultural imaginations of Christmas suggests either that we were ambivalent about the social effects of the automobile, or that they had not yet been overwhelmingly felt.
And:
Finally, nearly all these songs paint a picture of walkable and mixed-use neighborhoods, where shopping, socializing, and enjoying the general holiday mood can all happen simultaneously and unselfconsciously.
Finally, the canon of popular Christmas songs reveals
a tension between the old, small-town America they mostly take place within and the new and burgeoning America of car-dependent suburbia, allegedly a driver of loneliness, sameness, and atomization. Like Norman Rockwell portraits, they take place in a world which may never quite have existed, at least not for all Americans. They contain no cars, yet no apartment buildings. They imagine a world of both large detached houses and small tight-knit communities. The songs, like America writ large, do not wrestle with the fact that these things may well be contradictory.
Then I wrote that they may be. Now I would say they almost certainly are.
However, at long last, we are discovering some of this again. On Monday, I’ll be sharing Christmassy photos from the Reston Town Center, a credible attempt to build a “downtown” way out in the suburbs.
Related Reading:
Why Can’t Every Day Feel Like a Christmas Market?
The Christmas Song Cultural Barometer
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I wish my neighborhood growing up more resembled the Christmas Dickens village we displayed every year: residential houses juxtaposed with quaint old world local businesses. General stores, pharmacies, coffee/tea shops...
I can thankfully afford to live in a part of Brooklyn now where all of this is easily accessible. And I’m so very grateful.
I’m visiting family now who live in suburbs. And I’m remembering how trapped I felt growing up.
The post is not wrong, and it's typical of your work in being perceptive and delighting/enjoyable, as always.
But, it is perhaps unduly subtle, working/straining to make an argument from a heap of varied and barely remembered sources when you can take a more direct tact. The entire conceit of the holiday is a dude enters residences to leave presents via their chimneys - an architectural feature almost incongruous with a large swath of urban life and architecture.
This is especially so in the U.S., where the urban housing stock was largely built later, after the transition to stoves (in olden days) and before the faux chimneys found in higher-end high rise apartments today. While swaths of our major cities were just excluded from the holiday. It was so widespread that it became a joke in popular media to imagine how Santa could even visit them; what's he gonna do, take the fire escape?!?
This observation illuminates what real/authentic Christmas (and the kids and families who could have it) was and was not in this country, as well as two other points worth mentioning:
- as I assume everyone thought of when reading the above and considering who the occupants of such high rises were (or were assumed/stereotypes to be) in various eras throughout our history: the ethnic and racial dynamics behind defining Christmas and other holidays in ways that excluded certain groups or made one/certain ones a paragon to the diminution of others; and
- somewhat contra (or at least orthogonal to) the thrust of the post, the extent to which Christmas and other typically American, or American-soaked, holidays and traditions are, indeed, suburban, not just rural like the German villages they originated from. Our depiction of Santa works, in part, because those aspects of him which originated in rural life also work in Suburbia.
That's a beautiful thought to conclude on, because isn't that the American suburban dream at its best - preserving/allowing the enjoyment of the bucolic parts of rural living, like a cozy fireplace, in a modern and prosperous community and economy?
Apologies if this is too long or rambles too much; your insights stimulated a lot of interesting thoughts for me, as always.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours.