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Noon Edition

Celebrating Winter Holidays

The Monroe County Courthouse displays a Christmas tree each year.

It’s the holiday season again. With Hanukkah beginning this week, and Christmas and Kwanzaa just around the corner, it’s a time of diverse holiday celebrations.

With those celebrations comes a history of holiday traditions. This week on Noon Edition, we were joined by a panel of historical, religious and folklore experts.

Hanukkah is an eight-day Jewish holiday to commemorate the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt around 150 BCE.

The main practice and prayers generally remain the same in Hanukkah celebrations throughout the world, but the accompanying traditions differ according to location. Rabbi Ron Klotz, director of the Center for Informal Jewish Education at the Hillel Center at Indiana University, says people in other parts of the world don’t exchange gifts for Hanukkah.

“Because it’s so close to Christmas and because Jews are Americans and we want to celebrate our Americanism with our Judaism, we started a practice of giving presents to our kids,” Klotz says.

The gift-giving process is slightly different between the two holidays, as St. Nicholas, or Santa Claus, delivers the presents in the Christmas tradition.

John Johnson, a retired professor from the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, is an expert on St. Nicholas and his evolution through many cultures. In the United States version of Santa Claus, Johnson says St. Nicholas became a capitalist.

“He’s now the Patron Saint of Capitalism and he was selling things almost since he came here,” Johnson says.

He says Coca-Cola inspired the use of Santa Claus as a marketing tool when they hired an artist to paint Santa holding a Coca-Cola bottle.

The Monroe County History Center has a display of a collection of photographs showing the evolution of Santa Claus over the years, including early Coca-Cola images.

Dr. David Vanderstel, executive director of the Monroe County History Center, says the downtown Bloomington Canopy of Lights holiday tradition has happened every year since the 1980s, but it has earlier roots.

“We have an actual photograph in our collection of strands of lights going from the corner of the courthouse to the respective corners of the square,” Vanderstel says. “This was 1909, so right after the courthouse was built, so clearly this was a tradition that was renewed as the efforts to revitalize downtown.”

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