Offers a reassessment of the 'consumer rites' that social critics have decried. This book discusses how holiday celebrations were almost banished by Puritans and religious reformers but went on to be romanticized and reinvented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It offers a cultural history of the commercialization of American holidays.
"Consumer Rites is good history and good reading. . . . a terrific story terrifically told. . . . richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. . . . Give it as a gift next Christmas, Mother's Day or Father's Day! It's the American thing to do."
