Talk:True meaning of Christmas

Latest comment: 12 years ago by Dbachmann

There seems to be an interesting twist to this, as the sentiment that the "real meaning of Christmas" is not commercial but ideological is itself completely trivialized by the mass media and ends up as part of the Christmas industry it was originally critical of. Apparently the turning point is reached in the 1960s, with Charlie Brown and the Grinch animation. In the 1950s, the phrase was used by satirists in criticism of commercial Christmas. During the 1960s, this criticism was absorbed completely by the industry, and thus became itself open to being parodied. But so far I have found no parody predating Pratchett (1996). Perhaps during the 1970s and 1980s you would have needed to be extremely "meta" to make fun of a phrase which was in origin social criticism? It would be interesting to look for evidence of early satirists pointing out that the phrase had become a "zombie" in the 1970s or 1980s. --dab (𒁳) 12:25, 2 February 2012 (UTC)Reply