Books with title The Book of Christmas

- What is the significance of holly at Christmas?- When should you make your figgy pudding?- Why was the Old Lad's Passing Bell rung on Christmas Eve? - And who was Good King Wenceslas?Did you know that, long before turkey arrived on our shores, it was traditional to serve a roasted wild boar's head at Christmas? Or that our Christmases were once so cold that Frost Fairs were held on the River Thames? Christmas Day was first celebrated on 25 December in the fourth century CE. But when should our Christmas decorations come down - Twelfth Day, Twelfth Night ... or Candlemas? And why? Packed with fascinating facts about ancient religious customs and traditional feasts, instructions for Victorian parlour games and the stories behind our favourite carols, The Book of Christmas is a captivating volume about our Christmas past.

Acclaimed anthologist Fiona Waters has selected extracts from favorite poems and prose—both traditional and contemporary—to create an irresistible blend of Christmas magic, with writings by Ted Hughes, Christina Rossetti, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, and many more. This marvelous collection is illuminated throughout by the richly detailed illustrations of Matilda Harrison. By turns celebratory and joyous, nostalgic and poignant, The Book of Christmas is a lovely and enduring treasury.

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

There is little hope of bringing in the reign of good feeling by lighting a single Christmas fire, but a long line of such fires touching the receding horizon of the past with a happy glow is like a revival of a fading memory; it makes us suddenly aware of half-forgotten associations with the days that were once full of life and rippling with merriment like a mountain stream suffused with sunlight. We surrender ourselves so completely to the noisy activities of our own age that we forget how infinitesimal a portion of time it is and how misleading its emphasis often is. It is only a point on the face of the dial ; but we accept it as if it were a present eternity, a final stage in the evolution of men. That many of its sacred texts are the maxims of a short-sighted prudence, many of its major interests as short-lived as the passions of children, many of its ideas of life the cheapest parvenus in the world of thought, does not occur to us; its cynicisms are often reflections of its spiritual shallowness, and its scepticisms mere records of its meanness or corruption. Like all the times that have gone before it, it is a fragment of a fragment, and the only way to See life whole is to get away from it and look down on it as it takes its little place in the larger order of history.