It's a Wonderful Christmas: The Best of the Holidays 1940-1965
by Susan Waggoner
from Harry N. Abrams
Even now that we're all grown up, we can't help but look back on our childhood holidays and hope to recapture that elusive spirit of joyful anticipation. Celebrating Christmas is so often about nostalgia. With a nod and a wink to the days of Christmas past, It's a Wonderful Christmas presents classic images of the Yuletide icons of mid-20th-century America.
Bubbler lights and glow-in-the-dark icicles. Catalogues crammed with toys. Norad bulletins tracking Rudolph's red nose through the nighttime sky. Along with hundreds of such quintessentially American illustrations, author Susan Waggoner stocking-stuffs her lively text with fascinating bits of information, lore, and lists. Wonder what the all-time most popular Christmas song is? How the tradition of the department store Santa got started? The answers are here. Loaded with images of vintage Christmas cards, wrapping paper, magazine ads, Lionel toy trains, and more, all in full color, this charming book will appeal to anyone who associates Christmas with home movies, "The Chipmunk Song," and Santa relaxing with an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola. AUTHOR BIO: SUSAN WAGGONER is the author of several illustrated books, including Vintage Cocktails (STC). A native of Minnesota, she currently lives in New York City.
Thanksgiving a Time to Remember
by Barbara Rainey
from Family Life Publishing
Begin a new Thanksgiving tradition with this dramatic audio presentation of the Pilgrim's exciting Thanksgiving adventures! You'll be moved by their courage, challenged by their perseverance, and influenced by their heart of thankfulness for God's goodness and provision.
It's perfect to listen to on the way to Grandma's! Includes a Thanksgiving praise and worship CD, too!
The Joy of Family Traditions: A Season-by-Season Companion to 400 Celebrations and Activities
by Jennifer Trainer Thompson
from Ten Speed Press
When a special activity evolves into a tradition within a family, it creates meaning, connection, and community and makes common occasions more momentous and memorable. Establishing a sense of stability and shared history has never been more important to parents than it is today, as families become more fractured and scattered. THE JOY OF FAMILY TRADITIONS offers more than 400 fresh ideas and creative approaches to cultivating birthday, anniversary, holiday, and other rite-of-passage and seasonal traditions that strengthen personal bonds and reflect a family's individual style, spirituality, and values.
Extreme Pumpkins: Diabolical Do-It-Yourself Designs to Amuse Your Friends and Scare Your Neighbors
by Tom Nardone
from HP Trade
Pumpkins are supposed to be scary!
Based on his popular and addictive website ExtremePumpkins.com, Tom Nardone has created a full-color guide to pumpkin carving that's truly frightening. Featuring the website's signature Puking Pumpkin, and spanning everything from Drowning Pumpkin, Crime Scene Pumpkin, and Cannibal Pumpkin to Electrocuted Pumpkin and other never-before-seen designs, this gleefully gory guide is nothing short of a manifesto to take back Halloween from the cheerful, the cutesy, and the parent-sanctioned. For the egg-throwing, toilet tissue- streaming, window-soaping teenager in all of us, finally- a whole new way to celebrate October 31.
All Year Round (Lifeways)
by Ann Druitt
from Hawthorn Press
Full of seasonal stories, activities, crafts, poems and recipes, this book offers a guide to celebrating festivals throughout the seasons. A sequel to "The Children's Year", the book arises from the festivals workshops run by the authors at the annual Lifeways Conference at Emerson College. This book encourages both adults and children to explore forgotten corners of the educational curriculum and develop and adapt the various festivals to fit their own family traditions.
Chicken Soup for the Soul Christmas Treasury: Holiday Stories to Warm the Heart (Chicken Soup for the Soul)
by Jack Canfield
from HCI
Chicken Soup for the Soul Christmas Treasury captures the holiday spirit through an extensive story collection that demonstrates the humor, profound joy, and spiritedness that envelops the holiday season known as Christmas.
Join popular humorist Dave Barry, bestselling author Robert Fulghum, renowned author and lecturer Joan Wester Anderson, among many others, as they recount the special moments that lend to the magic and joy of the holiday celebration.
Christmas Curiosities: Odd, Dark, and Forgotten Christmas
by John Grossman
from Stewart, Tabori & Chang
Oh, by gosh, by golly. It’s time for . . . rowdy bands of drunkards roaming the streets, lighting firecrackers, and firing off guns? Gangs of masked youths invading people’s houses, demanding food, drink, and money—and threatening to break the windows (or worse) unless they’re given what they want?
Welcome to Christmas, circa 1800. Yes, the season of light, joy, and gift-giving was once regarded as a time of darkness, danger, and dissipation—and celebrated with all-too-public displays of noisemaking, inebriation, and gluttonous overeating. (Well, maybe not everything has changed.) And though we tend to imagine Victorian-era Christmases as sentimental gatherings around the candlelit tree, blazing hearth, and festive punchbowl, the 19th-century evidence tells us quite otherwise.
Drawing from his extensive collection of antique postcards, greeting cards, advertising giveaways, and other ephemera, author John Grossman presents a picture of Christmas past that, frankly, looks a lot more like Halloween. Broomstick-riding witches and vampire bat–borne cupids deliver New Year’s greetings. Fur-clad fairies gather ’round a campfire to roast their Christmas dinner—a huge dead rat. And Saint Nicholas? He’s that skinny guy in the bishop robes who arrives with his dark companion, the Devil-like Krampus brandishing switches to punish the badly behaved.
With Christmas Curiosities, STC wishes you a very merry, very scary Christmas.
The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas
by John Matthews
from Quest Books
Brimming with stories, activities, folklore, and recipes, this popular holiday gift book traces the history behind many sacred traditions of the season and provides practical suggestions for celebrating the Winter Solstice as a joyous, life-affirming festival.
Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us
by Allen Salkin
from Grand Central Publishing
A brand-new and revised edition of the hilarious guide to the national anti-holiday made famous by Seinfeld, complete with never-before-seen material, photos, and illustrations on how to prepare and enjoy your very own Festivus.
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (NY) (Images of America)
by Robert M. Grippo
from Arcadia Publishing
“Let’s have a parade” is the phrase that begins a beloved American tradition, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 1924, employees of the R. H. Macy and Company store in Herald Square, many of whom were immigrants and first-generation Americans, chose to give thanks for their good fortune in a manner reminiscent of the festive parades held in their native countries. The excitement and praise from crowds lining the route that first year led Macy’s to issue an immediate proclamation: the parade would become a tradition. Before the parade’s first decade passed, Macy’s welcomed the huge and spectacular helium character balloons that became its goodwill ambassadors. Since then, the parade has become a world-famous treasure. Through rare and historic images, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade offers readers a chance to reminisce, explore, and delight in eighty years of this thoroughly American celebration.
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