America's favorite holidays Candid histories

A favorite meme circulating on Facebook, usually around early December, comes from historians delighting in "the Puritans' War on Christmas," featuring factoids such as the Puritan law fining those who illicitly celebrated the pagan holiday five shillings or that the Pilgrims worked in the fields on Christmas Day. Charles Dickens came up with most of the Christmas lore known today. Like the other histories of holidays (St. Valentine's Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter) that religious studies professor Forbes (Morningside College) explores in his book, Christmas emerges as a "three-layer cake" of ancient, pagan, Christian, and contemporary commercial and popular cultural traditions. Winter solstice celebrations, featuring lights and greenery, served as the base. Christianity then crashed the winter party once its proponents decided that Christmas was the date of Jesus's birth, a story told in only two of the four Gospels, meaning that Easter historically was the more important Christian holiday. The Victorian-era icing of Santa Claus, family, Christmas cards, and gift giving topped off the holiday. This is a delightful book, full of history presented with a gracious and light touch--in other words, a perfect holiday present. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All public and academic libraries. --Paul Harvey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

This new book by Forbes (religious studies, Morningside Coll.; Christmas: A Candid History) discusses the particulars of our now widely accepted cultural practices surrounding Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, and Thanksgiving. The nature of folk and cultural traditions is such that we often assume that present-day customs have always been the norm. Forbes presents a genial and ably written corrective to that tendency, pointing out that each of these holidays typically includes three or four strands of tradition: seasonal observances, ancient symbols, religious overlays, and modern popular or commercial overlays. Some of the key lessons-holidays have never been "pure"; their observances historically are a muddle of sacred and secular interests, and that many rituals that seem ancient are either quite recent or have received renewed emphasis in the past century. VERDICT This accessible work deserves a wide readership and will be of interest to general readers, academic libraries, and religious leaders. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.