Evento

How Christmas Became a Respectable Holiday -- Dick Miller

Wednesday December 5 2018 10 am - 12pm

San Luis Obispo Methodist Church

$5 for LLCC members, $10 for non-members

Register Soon for "How Christmas Became a Respectable Holiday " on Brown Paper Tickets

Until the 1820s "traditional" American Christmas was typically a weeks-long riot of revelry, drunkenness, debauchery, and public disorder. Respectable people were appalled, and set out to convert the holiday from a pagan carnival by the lower orders into a celebration of piety, family, good cheer and proper deportment.

Within decades, Christmas had been tamed, domesticated, made a national holiday, and was primed to become, in later generations, a festival of consumer consumption.

This lecture-discussion course will explore how and why the Christmas we know came to be, and why we have, for the most part, forgotten its origins.

This is a course that Dick Miller has taught before. LLCC likes to bring it back in season because of popular demand.

Your instructor for this course is Dick Miller, a retired historian and long-time OLLI and LLCC instructor, with a raging curiosity about the origins of everyday things. His parents decorated his boyhood Christmas trees with cranberry and popcorn strings, century-old glass ornaments, and candles.

If you would like to have the password for the member price for this course, go to www.lifelearnerscc.org for information on how you can become a member.