The Book of Christmas

Carols are still sung in almost numberless churches, lights glow on altars bound and wreathed with spruce and holly, trees are set up in innumerable homes, and mobs of merry chi...

An Hue and Cry after Christmas The Doge's Christmas Shooting Thursday Processions in Advent The Glastonbury Thorn In the Kitchen Christmas in England Christmas Invitation A Chri...

But better than the Leipziger Messe, better even than a summer market at Freiburg or at Heidelberg, is a Christmas market in any one of the old German cities in the hill country...

His emblem as an apostle is a builder's rule or square; possibly associated with that other legend of the king of the Indies who ordered the saint to build him a magnificent pal...

When the world had endured five thousand and nine hundred years, after Eusebius the holy saint, Octavian the Emperor commanded that all the world should be described, so that he...

I do not know how the forty years I have been away have dealt with "Jule-nissen," the Christmas elf of my childhood in far-off Denmark. He was pretty old then, gray and bent, an...

For pleasure hath not ceased to wait On these expected annual rounds; Whether the rich man's sumptuous gate Call forth the unelaborate sounds, Or they are offered at the door Th...

This is the month, and this the happy morn Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King, Of wedded maid and virgin mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring; For so the...

A myriad wax candles twinkled in the gloom, but did not dispel it. It lingered under the great arches where the voice of the venerable minister, the responses of the congregatio...

See, what a wonderful smile! Does it mean That my little one knows of my love? Was it meant for an angel that passed unseen, And smiled at us both from above? Does it mean that...

Heap on more wood!--the wind is chill; But let it whistle as it will, We'll keep our Christmas merry still. Each age has deemed the new-born year The fittest time for festal che...

Within hail of the Sullivan Street school camps a scattered little band, the Christmas customs of which I had been trying for years to surprise. They are Indians, a handful of M...

A certain stir and bustle in the street evidently portended some important event. Spectators, market-women; workmen and bloused peasants, homeward bound with baskets emptied of...

More or less until Christmas Eve, all goes on in this way among our devout singers, with the difference of some gallons of wine or some hundreds of chestnuts. But this famous ev...

Of course nothing beautiful is difficult to believe. Even in the windows of the great florists, where the dear flowers pose as if for their portraits, we think that one looking...

The boys played about the court; on the bosom of the youngest sparkled the gold star that the Tree had worn on the happiest evening of his life; but that was past, and the Tree...

As the superficial fervency of youth decayed, this peculiar effect of Gervayse Hastings's character grew more perceptible. His children, when he extended his arms, came coldly t...

"Here come I, St. George; from Britain did I spring; I'll fight the Russian Bear, my wonders to begin. I'll pierce him through, he shall not fly; I'll cut him--cut him--cut him-...

This is the midnight of the century,--hark! Through aisle and arch of Godminster have gone Twelve throbs that tolled the zenith of the dark, And mornward now the starry hands mo...

The Old Year went out with much such a racket as we make nowadays, but of quite a different kind. We did not blow the New Year in, we "smashed" it in. When it was dark on New Ye...

These being thus prepared, and placed in order on the table, one of the ladies was persuaded to draw the arrow out of the body of the stag, which being done the claret wine issu...

But a truce to comparisons; for we are beginning to feel contrition for our crime against the country, and, with humbled head and heart, we beseech you to pardon us--ye rocks of...

A selection of what poets and prose writers have said about the great metropolis--that capital of all Europe which has for most Americans the closest attraction and the most las...