A Connecticut Christmas

Celebrate the Holiday Traditions of the Nutmeg State! A Connecticut Christmas is a photographic journey celebrating classic New England traditions, beauty, spirit, and community surrounding the holiday. From light displays to decorated churches and inns, spectacular private homes, festivals, carolers, town greens, and picturesque villages, this beautiful book of images and accompanying essays takes readers on a magical holiday tour through the Nutmeg State

Don’t date your students’ single fathers. It’s an obvious rule. It leads to complications. And it’s a rule I’ve never broken, nor even been tempted to break. I mean, for one thing, I don’t date. Not for lack of trying, but I’m just too damaged. My heart is too broken. Riley Kerr, however, isn’t my student. She’s in second grade, and she’s the sweetest, most darling young girl I’ve ever met. So when my path begins crossing her father’s, it’s complicated. Rory Kerr is…handsome. Rough-hewn. Solitary. But such a kind and loving father. And not the father of one of my students. He’s not really off-limits. Except that of my broken heart. Which he seems to just…effortlessly mend, piece by piece, without even realizing it. The holidays are approaching, and I usually spend them with my dysfunctional family back in Colorado. It’s not something I look forward to. But they’re all I have, so my Christmases are always spent there, with them. This year, the blooming something between Rory and me has me wondering… maybe this year I’ll be spending Christmas in Connecticut.

A classic Christmas story featuring all the magic of Santa combined with the magic of your favorite city, state, or country. It's the night before Christmas and you're nestled snug in your bed. Your stocking is hung by the chimney with care--will Santa visit your house? Follow Santa's journey in this magical retelling of a Christmas classic starring the locations and landmarks that make the place where you live special!

Christmas in Connecticut! These words immediately evoke warm images of stained-glass churches on snow-blanketed town greens, merry bands of roving carolers, sleigh bells ringing in the icy night, and candlelit fir trees decorated with popcorn and cranberries. Such a romantic world, a glittering Christmas card now vanished into the past, comes to life in this new collection of stories, poems, and sermons--forgotten writings that document Christmas as a much-loved tradition from the late 1700s until World War I. Puritan Connecticut not only ignored the holiday but made it illegal, yet by the 1850s Christmas in Connecticut was not only legal but a festive time of illuminated trees, colorful presents, Santa Claus, lavish family feasts, and quiet homilies about the birth of Christ in a Bethlehem manger. These early writings by Connecticut-born writers, like Harriet Beecher Stowe--mostly sentimental, often maudlin, but oddly quaint and sometimes surprisingly charming--have mostly disappeared into the dustbins of old bookstores. Now this lost, distant world reemerges. Outside it's snowing, the stockings hang on the fireplace mantel, and it's finally Christmas Eve. It's time for a little old-fashioned holiday storytelling.

This 20 year diary has fine calligraphy and drawings by Lynn Anderson. Each year features a pen and ink drawing of a different 19th century tradition, accompanied by an explanation of the holiday custom featured. Record visitors, special Christmas cards, family photographs and other memories.

Written for everyone who loves and is simultaneously driven crazy by the holiday season, Christmas: A Candid History provides an enlightening, entertaining perspective on how the annual Yuletide celebration got to be what it is today. In a fascinating, concise tour through history, the book tells the story of Christmas—from its pre-Christian roots, through the birth of Jesus, to the holiday's spread across Europe into the Americas and beyond, and to its mind-boggling transformation through modern consumerism. Packed with intriguing stories, based on research into myriad sources, full of insights, the book explores the historical origins of traditions including Santa, the reindeer, gift giving, the Christmas tree, Christmas songs and movies, and more. The book also offers some provocative ideas for reclaiming the joy and meaning of this beloved, yet often frustrating, season amid the pressures of our fast-paced consumer culture. DID YOU KNOW For three centuries Christians did not celebrate Christmas? Puritans in England and New England made Christmas observances illegal? St. Nicholas is an elf in the famous poem "The Night Before Christmas"? President Franklin Roosevelt changed the dateof Thanksgiving in order to lengthen the Christmas shopping season? Coca-Cola helped fashion Santa Claus's look in an advertising campaign?

Filled with the remarkable wit and humor of America's favorite storyteller, A Mark Twain Christmas gives readers insight into Twain's life through little known stories about how he and his family celebrated this treasured holiday. “If my boot should leave a stain on the marble…leave it there always in memory of my visit…and let it remind you to be a good little girl.” When Market Twain penned this enchanting letter from “Your loving Santa Claus” to his daughter Susy in 1875, a holiday tradition was born inside the Twain family home. And while Twain is celebrated as the sharpest satirist in American letters, he always had a soft spot for Christmas. A Mark Twain Christmas is in turns charming, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, and it ultimately reaffirms the magic of the Christmas spirit. Looking in on three holiday seasons with Twain, we learn more about the man than we ever knew before, and we discover fascinations from gifted elephants to burglar letters to Santa’s bootprints. But most of all, we regain an understanding of what is most important in our own lives, and that is the greatest gift of the Christmas season.