"Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling"
About this Quote
“Christmas isn’t a season. It’s a feeling” pulls a neat trick: it demotes the calendar and promotes the interior. Ferber takes a date-bound, commerce-swollen holiday and reframes it as a portable mood - something you can carry into a tenement hallway, a train station, a lonely rented room. That portability is the point. A “season” belongs to institutions: churches, schools, retailers, employers, the whole machinery that tells you when to perform cheer. A “feeling” belongs to the self, and Ferber’s line quietly pries Christmas away from official ownership.
The subtext is both tender and suspicious. Tender, because it argues for consolation beyond circumstance: you don’t need perfect weather, perfect family, or perfect spending power to access what the holiday promises. Suspicious, because it recognizes how quickly ritual can become obligation. If Christmas is only a season, you can miss it, fail it, get judged for not decorating correctly or not wanting to go home. If it’s a feeling, you can define it - and also admit when it isn’t there.
Context matters: Ferber wrote in an America being rapidly modernized, commercialized, and reshaped by mass media, with “Christmas” increasingly packaged as an event to be bought and displayed. Her phrasing resists that drift without turning preachy. It’s a novelist’s move: a line built for character psychology. It doesn’t redeem the holiday by moralizing; it redeems it by relocating it, from storefront spectacle to private meaning.
The subtext is both tender and suspicious. Tender, because it argues for consolation beyond circumstance: you don’t need perfect weather, perfect family, or perfect spending power to access what the holiday promises. Suspicious, because it recognizes how quickly ritual can become obligation. If Christmas is only a season, you can miss it, fail it, get judged for not decorating correctly or not wanting to go home. If it’s a feeling, you can define it - and also admit when it isn’t there.
Context matters: Ferber wrote in an America being rapidly modernized, commercialized, and reshaped by mass media, with “Christmas” increasingly packaged as an event to be bought and displayed. Her phrasing resists that drift without turning preachy. It’s a novelist’s move: a line built for character psychology. It doesn’t redeem the holiday by moralizing; it redeems it by relocating it, from storefront spectacle to private meaning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Christmas |
|---|---|
| Source | Quote attributed to Edna Ferber: "Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling." — listed on Wikiquote (Edna Ferber page). |
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