So... I'm taking a History of Christmas class, with one of the countries "Christmas experts", Stephen Nissenbuam. I am currently finishing my paper on nothing other than Christmas presents and their depictions through advertisements. After spending hours in front of a machine looking at microfilm, and staring at ads through computer bases, I have realized that even in 1820, Christmas advertisements were everywhere. While the gifts you could purchase were much less complex, they were advertise for people to see. As Christmas became a more industrialized and consumer holiday, advertisements changed with the holiday. Advertisers would attempt to sell anything for the holiday (for example: Buy your wife a fridge cause you're going to have to buy it eventually!) and the size of the advertisements increased. Instead of having 40-50 ads on a page, one Christmas ad would take up a 1/10 of the page. Now in 2007 ads are on the television, internet and take up full pages in magazines. The media has taken Christmas and ran with it. But its partially our fault, but we are now heavily drawn to holiday media, and love it.