Consumer Rites

Download or read book Consumer Rites written by Leigh Eric Schmidt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reexamining the story of holidays in the United States, Leigh Schmidt shows that commercial appropriations of these occasions were actually as religious in form as they were secular. The new rituals of America's holiday bazaar offered a luxuriant merger of the holy and the profane - a heady blend of fashion and faith, merchandising and gift giving, profits and sentiments. In this richly illustrated book that captures both the blessings and ballyhoo of American holiday observances from the mid-eighteenth century through the twentieth, the author offers a reassessment of the "consumer rites" that various social critics have long decried for their spiritual emptiness and banal sentimentality.