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How Christmas Became a Respectable Holiday -- Dick Miller

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 course will be held on Friday, December 6 from 1 to 3 p.m. at La Perla Del Mar Chapel in Shell Beach.

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.

This is a repeat by popular demand of a LLCC course that was offered last year at this time.

You can become a member of Lifelong Learners of the Lifelong Learners of the Central Coast and pay the member's price for this course. Go to www.lifelearnerscc.org and click on the "join us" tab for details.