American Christmas, American New Year

Flannery traces the texture of the American holiday season — from Dickens's A Christmas Carol through Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, the 1965 animated A Charlie Brown Christmas with Linus reading from the King James Version, and (yes) Die Hard — and argues that the secular American Christmas only makes sense because the original Christmas story, in the language most Americans first encountered it, remains the substrate underneath. The New Year coda extends the argument: the American calendar of meaning is built on inherited religious time.