Showing results for "Brian" in Holidays

Surely, Christmas in the distant past must have been different from the one we know today. But how different? You’re about to find out. The Christmases of long, long ago were a merry mess of odd superstitions, dangerous games, and overindulgences that lasted from Christmas Day until Epiphany twelve days later. The “Christmas season” of earlier times was not the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day that Americans experience today, but rather a no-holds-barred bacchanalia following the austerity period of Advent.

Christmas Past: The Fascinating Stories Behind Our Favorite Holiday’s Traditions reveals the surprising, quirky, mysterious, and sometimes horrifying stories behind the most wonderful time of the year.

The 12 crimes of Christmas: Bart Sagan is a thief, yes, but more or less a good guy - at least, he wouldn’t rob an orphanage if he didn’t have to. Not at Christmastime, anyway. But then the local crime boss, Harry King, loses a shipment of drugs and orders Bart to burglarize the 12 addresses to which it’s been accidentally sent. Can Bart and his ragtag band of independent criminals keep their Christmas spirit while breaking and entering at the behest of a drug lord? Can they keep their lives if they don’t?

Michael Stuyvesant was dying. A wealthy, courteous, and controlled man, all he wanted was to get to Denver to visit his children for one last Christmas. But sometimes even money, good manners, and a compulsive desire for order are not enough. God, the weather, a gigantic shopping-mall Santa Claus, and a pregnant girl who called herself Cheyenne - "like the city. And a river, too. And a mountain and an Indian tribe. I looked it up" - had other plans for him.

A memoir of childhood Christmases on the South Dakota plains. By turns sweet and comic, sentimental and serious, Joseph Bottum's Dakota Christmas is an instant Christmas classic. In this beautifully written account of the mad joys and wild emotions of Christmas for children, Bottum captures the universal spirit of the season even while he recounts his memories with a sharp particularity that brings them alive for listeners.