Everything is better at Christmas. Or, at least that’s what Hollywood would have you believe in the second half of the 20th century.
Like every complicated reality of the American experiment, Christmas is a deeply diverse representation of the best, worst, and banal in American history, and studying it can help us better understand ourselves and our world. By examining the holiday within its appropriate historical context and considering each iteration’s place in the vast history of Christmas studies, we can analyze the holiday at any point in American history for what it says about who we are as a nation, what values we hold, and how we would like to be remembered.
In my new book, Selling Out Santa: Hollywood Christmas Films in the Age of McCarthy, I use this framework of the American Christmas as a temporal societal mirror to analyze cinematic depictions of the holiday in the post-war, early Cold War period. The book takes into account histories of Christmas from the 19th and early 20th centuries while also exploring the period contemporary to the films, 1946 to 1961, to understand how and why the Christmas holiday was invoked in Hollywood releases throughout this tumultuous time in American politics and culture and, crucially, how it changed as a result of such fractured times.
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Mainstream Interpretations of Christmas
In the late 1940s, Hollywood became embroiled in scandal with allegations that some films were peddling Communist subversion. Throughout World War II, Hollywood had been a very prominent and prolific peddler of pro-American propaganda for the war effort. But, once the war ended and the power of such a vast cultural machine was realized, some in the government feared the possibility of such a machine in the wrong hands.
Others, such as the Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), J. Parnell Thomas, floated the idea with screenwriter and producer James K. McGuinness that perhaps Hollywood should continue making overtly pro-American media for cultural and civic instruction. While that propagandistic dream did not come wholly true for Thomas and McGuinness, we can read cultural shifts in this period that echo a new political reality in 1950s America.
Investigated by the FBI, interrogated by HUAC, and imprisoned by the Hollywood Blacklist, the motion picture industry was under immense pressure in the mid-century to avoid federal suspicions of Communist sympathies. Not every film released in this period conformed to these pressures, some even outrightly challenged the pressure to conform, but the Christmas films in this period did change drastically. This change can be oversimplified as shifting in tone and content from communal attitudes of the holiday to staunch individualism.
