Not Just for Christmas

Advent Calendar Mimi Sheller |

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"There are many ways to have an ethical, green, or sustainable Christmas. If there was one thing you would want people to do every day as well, what would it be?"

"There are many ways to have an ethical, green, or sustainable Christmas. If there was one thing you would want people to do every day as well, what would it be?"

Mimi Sheller is Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Swarthmore College and Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University in England. She is also currently a Fellow in the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and Co-Editor of the journal Mobilities. She was awarded her A.B. from Harvard University (1988, summa cum laude) in History and Literature, and MA (1993, with distinction) and PhD (1997) in Sociology and Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research. She also held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for African and Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan. She has published two monographs and three co-edited books, over a dozen book chapters and twenty articles in international refereed journals. In 2002, she Received Choice Magazine Outstanding Book Award for her book Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. Her research funding includes the MacArthur Foundation, the British Academy, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is the co-founder and co-director the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University, where she is now Senior Research Fellow, and she is co-editor of the international journal Mobilities. She has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals, encyclopedias, and a Routledge book series, and as Chair and Vice-Chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies in the UK. Back to the NJfC Advent Calendar	A Charlie Brown Christmas, the animated TV special, premiered in 1965 featuring the newest trend in an age-old tradition: the aluminum Christmas tree. Lucy orders the hapless Charlie Brown to “get the biggest aluminum tree you can find… maybe painted pink” for their staging of the nativity story. Charlie Brown instead returns from the tree farm with a spindly little fir tree that caught his sympathy amongst the glittering metal faux-trees. Linus warns him that it “doesn’t seem to fit the modern spirit”, as epitomized by the silvery aluminum Christmas tree. “The aluminum tree,” according to Tom Vanderbilt (in a nostalgic essay written for an entire book on the subject), “was a shining beacon to the optimism of the Space Age, a monument of Pop modernism, and proof of American manufacturing prowess. Where else but in a country that had conquered a sprawling and primeval wilderness could Nature herself be improved upon?”* A shining emblem of the age of aluminum, the re-usable, economical, brightly beautiful copy of a living tree made perfect sense within this material culture. Yet, in the end, the children embrace Charlie Brown’s living tree as representing the “true meaning of Christmas”. In Charles Schulz’s prescient comic critique of the commercialization of Christmas, the gaudy aluminum tree stands in for all that is wrong with American culture: false, flashy, flimsy, faddish. It hints at a deep-seated disquiet with the promise of Modernity as making a better world. For this Christmas -- and every day of the year – I wish we would stop and appreciate the spirit of living trees (hopefully not in our living rooms) and remember to recycle our aluminum cans. More than 61 billion cans get thrown out in the United States every year, even though recycling aluminum takes only 5% of the energy that is needed to produce it from bauxite ore, not to mention the environmental consequences of its mining -- which has uprooted and displaced tens of thousands of indigenous peoples in many parts of the world (such as Suriname, Guinea, and Brazil) and left behind destroyed land. Aluminum smelting is one of the most energy-intensive processes in the world, and is responsible for huge hydroelectric power projects that have been so damaging to remote parts of Iceland, Orissa (India), Southern Africa, and Canada. So when your life is made easier by the lightweight aluminum in the car or bus you rode in today, the airplane you might fly in on your Xmas holiday, the big trays you cooked your Xmas dinner in, the foil you used to wrap up the leftovers, or the aluminum encased laptop you used to send holiday messages and pictures to your loved ones…do the Earth a favor and remember where the metal came from and make that little effort to get it into the recycling bin – and keep doing it every day of the year. * See Tom Vanderbilt, “Trees for an Age of Glitter”, pp. 68-76 in J. Shimon and J. Lindemann, Season’s Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree (New York: Melcher Media, 2004), p. 71.

Mimi Sheller is Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Swarthmore College and Senior Research
Fellow in the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University in
England. She is also currently a Fellow in the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and Co-Editor of the journal Mobilities.

She was awarded her A.B. from Harvard University (1988, summa cum laude) in History and Literature, and MA (1993, with distinction) and PhD (1997) in
Sociology and Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research. She also held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for African and Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan. She has published two monographs and three co-edited books, over a dozen book chapters and twenty articles in international refereed journals. In 2002, she Received Choice Magazine Outstanding Book Award for her book
Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica.

Her research funding includes the MacArthur Foundation, the British Academy, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is the co-founder and co-director the Centre for Mobilities Research at
Lancaster University, where she is now Senior Research Fellow, and she is co-editor of the international journal Mobilities. She has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals, encyclopedias, and a Routledge book series, and as Chair and Vice-Chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies in the UK.

Back to the NJfC Advent
Calendar

A Charlie Brown Christmas, the animated TV special, premiered in 1965 featuring the newest trend in an age-old tradition: the aluminum Christmas tree. Lucy orders the hapless Charlie Brown to “get the biggest aluminum tree you can find… maybe painted pink” for their staging of the nativity story. Charlie Brown instead returns from the tree farm with a spindly little fir tree that caught his sympathy amongst the glittering metal faux-trees. Linus warns him that it “doesn’t seem to fit the modern spirit”, as epitomized by the silvery aluminum Christmas tree.

“The aluminum tree,” according to Tom Vanderbilt (in a nostalgic essay written for an entire book on the subject), “was a shining beacon to the optimism of the Space Age, a monument of Pop modernism, and proof of American manufacturing prowess. Where else but in a country that had conquered a sprawling and primeval wilderness could Nature herself be improved upon?”* A shining emblem of the age of aluminum, the re-usable, economical, brightly beautiful copy of a living tree made perfect sense within this material culture.

Yet, in the end, the children embrace Charlie Brown’s living tree as representing the “true meaning of Christmas”. In Charles Schulz’s prescient comic critique of the commercialization of Christmas, the gaudy aluminum tree stands in for all that is wrong with American culture: false, flashy, flimsy, faddish. It hints at a deep-seated disquiet with the promise of Modernity as making a better world.

Aluminium Tree Exhibit

For this Christmas -- and every day of the year – I wish we would stop and appreciate the spirit of living trees (hopefully not in our living rooms) and remember to recycle our aluminum cans. More than 61 billion cans get thrown out in the United States every year, even though recycling aluminum takes only 5% of the energy that is needed to produce it from bauxite ore, not to mention the environmental consequences of its mining -- which has uprooted and displaced tens of thousands of indigenous peoples in many parts of the world (such as Suriname, Guinea, and Brazil) and left behind destroyed land. Aluminum smelting is one of the most energy-intensive processes in the world, and is responsible for huge hydroelectric power projects that have been so damaging to remote parts of Iceland, Orissa (India), Southern Africa, and Canada.

So when your life is made easier by the lightweight aluminum in the car or bus you rode in today, the airplane you might fly in on your Xmas holiday, the big trays you cooked your Xmas dinner in, the foil you used to wrap up the leftovers, or the aluminum encased laptop you used to send holiday messages and pictures to your loved ones…do the Earth a favor and remember where the metal came from and make that little effort to get it into the recycling bin – and keep doing it every day of the year.

* See Tom Vanderbilt, “Trees for an Age of Glitter”, pp. 68-76 in J. Shimon and J. Lindemann, Season’s Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree (New York: Melcher Media, 2004), p. 71.

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