Past Present

On this week’s Past Present podcast, Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, and Neil Young discuss the war on Christmas, food politics, and political spouses. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: The “war on Christmas” has become a regular part of the holiday season. The conservative website Newsmax has catalogued the big offenders of 2015. Neil argued the “war on Christmas” is largely a media phenomenon, noting that many religious leaders have chosen to ignore the controversy or to argue that the real war on Christmas is the holiday’s over-commercialization.  Neil also observed that the Puritans outlawed Christmas because the holiday had such decadent celebrations. To read more about the controversial history of Christmas, see Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas.A new grocery store venture, Daily Table, seeks to provide low-income consumers with more affordable food by selling about-to-expire foods from farmers and wholesalers. Natalia noted that dates used for f