About This Book
This work surveys the customs, ceremonies, traditions, superstitions, entertainments, and social meanings surrounding the Christmas season, tracing mingled origins and the festival's changing fortunes. It describes domestic preparations and foods such as mince pies and plum pudding, carol-singing, waits, bellmen, and masquerades; public and rural observances across holy days including Christmas Eve and Day, St. Thomas's and St. Stephen's Days, New Year’s and Twelfth Night; seasonal sports, mummers, pantomime, wassailing, and civic rituals; and considers the decline, partial revival, and cultural implications of these practices.
About the Author
You May Also Like
6 picks
"'Tis Sixty Years Since" / Address of Charles Francis Adams; Founders' Day, January 16, 1913
by Charles Francis Adams
"1683-1920" / The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How It Worked—"Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—Germantown Settlement of 1683 and a Thousand Other Topics
by Frederick Franklin Schrader
"1812"
by Vasilïĭ Vasilʹevich Vereshchagin
"Barbarous Soviet Russia"
by Isaac McBride
"Brother Bosch", an Airman's Escape from Germany
by Gerald Featherstone Knight
"Buffalo Bill" from Prairie to Palace: An Authentic History of the Wild West
by John M. Burke