They really didn’t.
The “preserved culture” in American society is to the original culture,
as Hollywood is to reality.
or American Pizza to Pizza
or Egg McMuffin to Eggs Benedict
or Santa Claus to Saint Nicolas
or Macy’s Day to honest-to-god public celebrations.
NOTHING has survived the great American machine of commercialization.
It’s all an over-simplified, exaggerated, contrived and desperate attempt to create and maintain some kind of idealised identity, in the midst of the most meaningless and bland society in the history of the world. Good for them, I say, but it never lasts long when people try too hard.
Really, the worst thing to come out of it is this idea, that so many Americans have, that they live in this wonderful varied society with more genuine traditions and real culture than anywhere else, when in fact all that “culture” is regarded by everyone else in the world with derision, as a childish bastardization of the reality, created by corporations, ironically enough, solely to appeal to – and make money from – the American fetish for supposedly meaningful cultural identifications.