Winter Holidays and Winter Themes: Christmas

Drawing on a wealth of research, this "fascinating" book (The New York Times Book Review) charts the invention of our current Yuletide traditions, from St. Nicholas to the Christmas tree and, perhaps most radically, the practice of giving gifts to children.  Anyone who laments the excesses of Christmas might consider the Puritans of colonial Massachusetts: they simply outlawed the holiday. The Puritans had their reasons, since Christmas was once an occasion for drunkenness and riot, when poor "wassailers  extorted food and drink from the well-to-do. In this intriguing and innovative work of social history, Stephen Nissenbaum rediscovers Christmas's carnival origins and shows how it was transformed, during the nineteenth century, into a festival of domesticity and consumerism.      Bursting with detail, filled with subversive readings of such seasonal classics as "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and A Christmas Carol, The Battle for Christmas captures the glorious strangeness of the past even as it helps us better understand our present.  

This nostalgic recollection of Christmas past by celebrated Welsh poet Dylan Thomas evokes the beauty of the season at every turn: the warmth of a family gathering; the loveliness of a mistletoe-decked home; the predictability of cats by the fire; the mischief of children left to their own devices; and the sheer delight of gifts, be they Useful or Useless.

An anthology of poems, stories, and plays which reflect the religious aspects of Christmas.

One night, the old money-lender Ebenezer Scrooge receives four visitors. The first is the ghost of his business partner, Jacob Marley, who warns Scrooge of the night ahead. The next three spirits show Scrooge what he once was, what he came to be, and what will become of him if he continues to be a miserly, selfish, cheerless person. Scrooge must regain his compassion and humanity to avoid the fate shown to him by the last spirit. First published in 1843, Charles Dickens' English novella is a classic Christmas story. This unabridged version of the text is taken from the 1847 edition, with original illustrations by John Leech.

Imaginative, heartwarming classic tells of the eerie encounters of Ebenezer Scrooge, an arrogant and insensitive miser whose ghostly journeys through the past, present, and future provide glimpses of his life as a schoolboy, apprentice, and young lover. His visions ultimately transform him into a generous and caring individual -- loving all and by all beloved. Unabridged edition.

First published in 1956, this much sought-after autobiographical recollection from Truman Capote about his rural Alabama boyhood is a perfect gift for Capote's fans young and old. Seven-year-old Buddy inaugurates the Christmas season by crying out to his cousin, Miss Sook Falk: "It's fruitcake weather!" Thus begins an unforgettable portrait of an odd but enduring friendship and the memories the two friends share of beloved holiday rituals.

The Christmas story from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke lavishly illustrated with paintings and woodcuts.

Christmas belongs to everyone and this collection has been planned to remind the reader what Christmas means to all of us and to show what people have made of it.

Includes the favorite redemption tale of misanthrope Ebenezer Scrooge as well as such holiday pieces as "The Chimes," "The Cricket on the Hearth," "The Battle of Life" and "The Haunted Man."

The Forgotten Carols is an innovative storybook/CD about a nurse whose empty life is changed by her patient, John. As the story moves along, the characters in the novel break into song, which are included on the compact disc. Line drawings.

A husband and wife sacrifice treasured possessions in order to buy each other Christmas presents.

An anthology of Christmas prose, poetry, and carols, reflecting both the religious and the secular aspects of the Christmas festival.

Chronicles the joy and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies in nineteenth-century New England.

The history of Christmas in the U.S. and Great Britain includes: 'Traditional' Christmas, Old Christmas, Victorian Christmas, Wartime Christmas, and Christmas in the 20th Century.

Mr. Ives' Christmas speaks eloquently to the most basic and fulfilling aspects of life for all of us. Mr. Ives has a successful career in advertising, a wife and two children, and believes he has achieved the typical American dream. But the dream is shattered when his son Robert, who is studying for the priesthood, is killed at Christmas. Overwhelmed by grief and threatened by a loss of faith in humankind, Mr. Ives begins to question the very foundations of his life. Part love story--of a man for his wife, for his children, for God--and part meditation on how a person can find spiritual peace in the midst of crisis, Mr. Ives's Christmas "is a magnificently sad and enchanting novel, a celebration, ultimately, of giving and of grace." (Booklist)

Written for publication as a serial, The Pickwick Papers is a sequence of loosely-related adventures. The action is given as occurring 1827-8, though critics have noted some seeming anachronisms. It has been stated that Dickens satirized the case of George Norton suing Lord Melbourne in The Pickwick Papers. The novel's main character, Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, the founder and perpetual president of the Pickwick Club. To extend his researches into the quaint and curious phenomena of life, he suggests that he and three other "Pickwickians" (Mr Nathaniel Winkle, Mr Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr Tracy Tupman) should make journeys to places remote from London and report on their findings to the other members of the club. Their travels throughout the English countryside by coach provide the chief theme of the novel. A distinctive and valuable feature of the work is the generally accurate description of the old coaching inns of England. (One of the main families running the Bristol to Bath coaches at the time was started by Eleazer Pickwick).Its main literary value and appeal is formed by its numerous memorable characters. Each character in The Pickwick Papers, as in many other Dickens novels, is drawn comically, often with exaggerated personality traits.

Stories, poems, carols, and recollections of Christmas by world-famous authors, with 120 illustrations by Norman Rockwell.

A facsimile of Thackeray's own manuscript and illustrations of a fairy tale, created for a sick child, telling about nonsense adventures at a royal court.

Here is a delightful holiday surprise from a world-famous mystery writer -- five poems and six stories, all touched with the spirit of Christmas. A retelling of the Christmas Story in a way you've never heard it before. ... The fable of a donkey who carries a mother and child safely to Egypt. ... The tale of a widow who dislikes people until she meets a stranger. . . .From the most popular writer of all time comes a treasured collection of short stories and poems celebrating the holiday season ...

In this vividly written narrative, Jody Rosen provides both the fascinating story behind the making of America's favorite Christmas carol and a cultural history of the nation that embraced it. Berlin, the Russian-Jewish immigrant who became his adopted country's greatest pop troubadour, had written his magnum opus -- what one commentator has called a "holiday Moby-Dick"--A timeless song that resonates with some of the deepest themes in American culture: yearning for a mythic New England past, belief in the magic of the "merry and bright" Christmas season, longing for the havens of home and hearth. Today, the song endures not just as an icon of the national Christmas celebration but as the artistic and commercial peak of the golden age of popular song, a symbol of the values and strivings of the World War II generation, and of the saga of Jewish-American assimilation. With insight and wit, Rosen probes the song's musical roots, uncovering its surprising connections to the tradition of blackface minstrelsy and exploring its unique place in popular culture through six decades of recordings by everyone from Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley to *NSYNC. White Christmas chronicles the song's legacy from jaunty ragtime-era Tin Pan Alley to the elegant world of midcentury Broadway and Hollywood, from the hardscrabble streets where Irving Berlin was reared to the battlefields of World War II where American GIs made "White Christmas" their wartime anthem, and from the Victorian American past that the song evokes to the twenty-first-century present where Berlin's masterpiece lives on as a kind of secular hymn.