Abstract: The celebration of Christmas with Christmas trees and gift giving emerged from Pagan traditions as a holiday ritual in the early nineteenth century in Northern German homes. It was part of the creation of a bourgeois culture of celebration and the invention of a national (German) identity. From the time of its invention, American observers followed with fascination and envy the development of this new custom and arranged for its intercultural transfer across the Atlantic. Americans such as Charles Loring Brace and George Ticknor described this festival as a truly German custom that could be found in every German home. They recognized in this ritual the potential for providing the glue that could hold together the society and culture of new countries such as Germany and the United States. Therefore, they advocated the appropriation of this custom by Anglo-American families in the 1840s and 1850s.

This marked the second introduction of the tradition of Christmas into American society. Years before Ticknor began to advocate the celebration of this festival, German-American families had already brought this custom to the United States. However, the first introduction of this custom into American society had not resulted in the wide acceptance of this alien custom. It remained confined to the German-American subculture. The intercultural transfer of Christmas between German and American societies provides important insights into the role of agents of intercultural transfer and points to the necessity for the belonging of those agents to the receiving society if such a transfer is to succeed.

This chapter has not been previously published but emerged from several presentations and lectures.

The Origin of Weihnachten and of the Weihnachtsbaum

The celebration of Christmas with the exchange of gifts that children and adults find under the Christmas tree has become a ritual with a clearly established sequence of events and clearly defined roles for everyone involved. In the United States, this holiday has come to be seen as a celebration of Christ';s birth. Yet, the modern Christmas ritual in the nineteenth century emerged not from Christian tradition but rather from Pagan tradition. American observers, furthermore, identified this ritual with the project of nation building and the invention of national identity, the German national identity in particular.