CULTURE/SOCIETY: Redesigning Christmas

This is from the NPR radio show, Studio 360. - OlderMusicGeek


December 05, 2008
Redesigning Christmas

The buzzword this year is change. But some things, like the traditions that surround the Christmas season, seem to remain the same. Kurt Andersen asked the design firm Pentagram to re-imagine the holiday beyond tinsel and holly. It goes something like this: drop the Santa, loose the red and green, play down the rampant commercialism and play up the message of peace and love.

View Pentagram's full Christmas redesign presentation.
Check out downloadable x.mas wrapping paper.
Then send an x.mas e-card to a friend!

(Originally aired: December 22, 2006)

Listen to the show from 2006 with a Robin Hitchcock Christmas Song, the techno tune "Unsilent Night", and a bit about

Some of the comments:
[5]
Posted by: Brandon Emerick December 06, 2008 - 10:31AM
Brooklyn

Fun and clever ideas! I'm all about the Xmas. Here's my contribution to your celebration:

Which is my re-imagining of the "yule log"...

[6]
Posted by: John Mc Donagh December 06, 2008 - 10:38AM
Brooklyn

I was happy to hear all week about the idea of redesigning Christmas but utterly disappointed in the actual segment in this week's show. You only dealt with the shallow image of Christmas and not the true meaning of this more pagan mid-winter festival.

Christians have merely grafted the birth of Christ onto the wonderful older northern European wintertime feast of plenty etc. It represented the darkest moment in the year having planted inside of it the brightest hope. The winter solstice, when the sun reaches the lowest point in the sky, ends this descent and begins the climb towards the warmth of the summer once again.

To an old, farming, hunting people it must have marked such a hope that things were turning around and that the cycle of life and of growth would once again begin.

It's not ironic that, this year, the death of the Bush 8-year-period (the lowest point in the past century) should be marked by the time of great hope and historic turn around.

[9]
Posted by: Adam December 08, 2008 - 12:23AM
Minnesota

How odd that Christmas would be redesigned by a company named after a pagan/demonic symbol.

A link to all my Christmas posts

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