Imitation That Fails

Oakland's spectacular and historic Christmas Pageant exemplifies the dual thrust of holiayization's formula and it's overall weakness as a unifying force in December. The pageant, which began in 1919, featured nearly 2,000 school children annually as well as adult performers and was for many years a high point of the social season. Before the vogue of more casual dress, ladies arrived in elegant gowns and men in tuxedos. It had everything you might expect from the quintessential Christmas extravaganza - a live orchestra, Santa and reindeer, dancing snow people, elves and fairies, all manner of anthropomorphic symbols and ornaments and toys (I was a dancing holly sprig), a nativity tableau, and more.
In 1982, with the advent of Holidayization and after over 60 years, the name was changed to "Holiday Pageant", however the content was allowed to remain unchanged for a number of years, except for the removal of the nativity tableau.
In 1987 it was declared that the pageant was European in origin and was discontinued, even though the participants in the pageant ran the gamut of Oakland's racial diversity. This declaration couldn't have taken too much insight because our culture is European-based in so many ways.
Our language, clothing, government and architecture all reflect this. To illustrate how multi-racial the pageant was, in 1989, a multi-racial sculpture of four Christmas Pageant fairies (Black, White, Latino and Asian) was placed in Oakland's Fairyland Park to honor Miss Louise Jorgensen who taught the dances to three generations of children and who was the guiding force behind the pageant. Photographs and films also attest to the pageant's diversity. Oakland's subsequent attempt to mount a multi-culturally themed pageant pageant lasted but one year." The Children's Holiday Festival" was a drastic departure from the Christmas Pageant.
The performance told a story of two aliens from Outer Space on a mission to find life in the galaxy in order to learn ways to save their planet. When they encounter children, they discover that humans are of many different colors, whereas beings on their planet are uniformly green.
The aliens don't need to travel further to learn about the diversity of human beings because it's all there in Oakland. A world dance recital follows - a Jewish wedding dance, Russian court dance, German Octoberfest, Flamenco, Hawaiian Rainbow, Chinese, African, Mexican Hat, Calipso, Irish jig, etc. It ended with an acrobatic dance and song with an ecology theme performed by Santa. He bellowed "Ho Ho Ho" over and over but couldn't muster "Merry Christmas".
All in all it was a non-holiday/holiday festival. No attempt was made to describe any underlying traits that could have been called American. The common thread throughout was diversity for it's own sake. As one earth child explained "We all live here but come from each and every place on earth. We have songs for everything". True to the multi-cultural plan, it was a portrait of America as a patchwork of elements (in this case dances) from other lands.
The Christmas Pageant was the traditional model after which the Holiday Festival was based. There would have been no Holiday Festival had it not been for the pageant before.
The unfortunate pattern is typical enough. "Holiday" tries to imitate Christmas but ultimately fails to catch the public's imagination or engage it for long. In this case, a program with a unifying theme of December holidays wasn't even attempted, probably because people "from each and every place on earth" don't have holidays in December. The "We have songs about everything" idea didn't include a December holiday song. Nothing resembling the Christmas Pageant has been produced in Oakland since then. Some might point to lack of funds and the advent of television for the pageant's demise. But Oakland mustered enough interest and funds to produce other community events like "Festival at the Lake", "Gay Mardi Gras "and "Art and Soul", plus money for the pageant wasn't always taken for granted. It's also apparent that holidayization hasn't changed so very much over the last fifteen years. The formula has increasingly been applied with more strictness with the results that Christmas has become an endangered species.

NEXT