America S Oddest Holidays

Every day is a holiday if someone wants it to be. No, really. America’s calendar is always adding new holidays, and some of them are truly odd. People from all over the world have moved to America, bringing unique traditions with them along the way. Other traditions are just silly and fun, such as September 19th's “Talk Like a Pirate Day.” With its high-interest subject matter and amazing photographs, this book will show readers the many holidays they’ve been missing, and maybe some they’d rather not celebrate at all.

Every day is a holiday if someone wants it to be. No, really. America’s calendar is always adding new holidays, and some of them are truly odd. People from all over the world have moved to America, bringing unique traditions with them along the way. Other traditions are just silly and fun, such as September 19th's “Talk Like a Pirate Day.” With its high-interest subject matter and amazing photographs, this book will show readers the many holidays they’ve been missing, and maybe some they’d rather not celebrate at all.

How more than 50 of our holidays originated and are observed today.

Whether they're decorating Easter trees or celebrating Wagner's birthday by playing recordings of his Ring cycle operas and incinerating a model of Valhalla on an outdoor barbecue to the closing strains of "Gotterdämerung," Americans know both how to create and how to celebrate holidays. Jack Santino's guide to such frivolity is a wonderfully readable exploration of holidays, periods of festivity, and life-cycle rituals and celebrations. Santino draws on history, anthropology, popular culture, and folklore to show the intricate relationships between holidays and the roles that celebrations and rituals play in people's lives.

This book tells the stranger-than-fiction story of how a poor white family from Indiana was scapegoated into prominence as America's "worst" family by the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, then "reinvented" in the 1970s as part of a vanguard of social rebellion. In what becomes a profoundly unsettling counter-history of the United States, Nathaniel Deutsch traces how the Ishmaels, whose patriarch fought in the Revolutionary War, were discovered in the slums of Indianapolis in the 1870s and became a symbol for all that was wrong with the urban poor. The Ishmaels, actually white Christians, were later celebrated in the 1970s as the founders of the country's first African American Muslim community. This bizarre and fascinating saga reveals how class, race, religion, and science have shaped the nation's history and myths.

At a time when the U.S. flag is both a source of both pride and controversy, this volume provides the first encyclopedic A-to-Z treatment of the U.S. flag in American history, culture, and law. This title is a comprehensive resource for understanding all aspects of the American flag and its relationship to the American people. The encyclopedia provides a thorough historical examination of key developments in the flag's design as well as laws and court decisions related to the flag and the First Amendment. In relation to the flag's history, it also discusses evolving public attitudes about its importance as a national symbol. The encyclopedia contains illuminating scholarly essays on presentations of the flag in American politics, the military, and popular culture including art, music, and journalism. Additionally, these essays address important rules of flag etiquette and modern controversies related to them, from flag-burning to refusing to stand during the playing of the U.S. National Anthem.

The holidays that we celebrate are relatively unchanged from their origins in faraway lands. This book is a tribute to the diversity of imagination surrounding some of America's most honored and sometimes offbeat cultural traditions. Beginning on New Year's Day and following the calendar year, it presents a montage of newspaper accounts, oral histories, and journal entries documenting: traditions, beliefs, legends, charms, riddles, gifts, superstitions, proverbs, recipes, poems, parades, songs, dances, games, contests and plays. Hundreds of observances are associated with the more than 60 weird and wonderful holidays!

Extracted from Gale's Folklore of American holidays, 2d ed. (1991). See following entry. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR