When the song was first released, Freberg was told by a Capitol executive that he’d never work in advertising again. The record was lambasted in advertising trade magazines, and caused advertisers to demand that their segments be played with a buffer of at least 15 minutes from the song. A station manager at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles described “Green Christmas”—apparently without irony—as “sacrilegious.” But Freberg wrote in his 1988 autobiography, It Only Hurts When I Laugh, that despite the attempts to limit the exposure of “Green Christmas,” he got loads of fan mail about the record, much of which came from members of the clergy who admired its message. About six months after the song’s release, Coca-Cola and Marlboro both approached Freberg to work on satirical ads, and though he rejected Marlboro, he ended up worked with Coca-Cola on a successful campaign. Despite (or perhaps because) of the controversy, Freberg’s career as an adman spanned decades.

The ruthlessly commodified landscape that Freberg warned about hasn’t gone away. If anything, it has only grown more insidious: Social media, smart devices, and native-ad content have made Christmas commerce impossible to avoid. The low-key, conversational tone of much contemporary advertising allows it to fade seamlessly into the background noise of daily life. The Mr. Scrooge of “Green Christmas” would be positively giddy at the idea of digital beacons that track your movements via your smartphone, then creepily show you online ads for the very thing you just shopped for in real life. And the fact that you tend to hear cheery Christmas songs while shopping is not an accident: Retail “soundtracks” have been a fixture of the holiday season in America since Muzak went mainstream in the 1950s. But retailers also understand that there’s a fine line between setting a festive tone in stores and driving shoppers crazy. Over and above sheer auditory annoyance, the tension between loving and loathing holiday tunes is just one facet of a long-standing ambivalence about Christmas and consumerism.

Read: The joy of no-gift Christmas

One vein of Christmas commentary holds that the holiday has become much more businesslike than it used to be. However one might feel about the ways in which the holiday today differs from that of a fondly remembered childhood, modern Christmas itself is as old as Americans’ anxieties about its alleged commercialization.

The way Christmas is now celebrated, with its twin focus on retail and childhood, is a cultural tradition that dates back less than 200 years. Even the way one imagines Santa’s workshop, which is superficially rustic but conceptually modern, contains a subtle critique of 19th-century capitalism. One classic depiction comes from an 1866 Harper’s Weekly illustration by Thomas Nast called Santa Claus and His Works, which shows Saint Nick sewing clothing for dolls, finishing wooden toys by hand, and consulting a hefty Record of Behavior—presumably to prepare for the big December 24 toy run. Santa’s portrayal here is like the Christmas equivalent of a Craftsman-style bungalow, or a 19th-century Gothic Revival building: It employs the imagery of a romanticized medieval past to disguise the guts of a rapidly industrializing consumer culture.