The purpose of Rudolph Day is to keep the Christmas spirit all year long. One can prepare Christmas gifts or crafts, watch a Christmas movie, play Christmas music, or read a Christmas book.
If you're lucky, autumn has already arrived or fall is just around the corner. Christmas is just over the horizon! Today there are exactly three months until Christmas.
Here are three 19th century Christmas tales:
The Christmas Angel, Abbie Farwell Brown.
The Romance of a Christmas Card, Kate Douglas Wiggin
(Incidentally, this story takes place in Beulah, also the setting for Wiggins' Mother Carey's Chickens, which Disney made into the film Summer Magic.)
When the Yule Log Burns, Leona Dalrymple
There are many histories of Christmas out there, from the old-fashioned tomes of Dawson and Miles, to the newest volumes about Christmas in the United States by Nissenbaum and Restad. However, in her Merry Christmas! Karal Ann Marling does a fresh take on the vision of Christmas in America. In this delightful, quite readable volume, Marling traces the history of familiar Christmas things, beginning with wrapping paper and ending with classic Christmas films, with material taken from the magazines and newspapers of the day. We discover how the now ubiquitous Christmas villages go back to the German putz under the Christmas tree and the Italian presipio; how trends in concealing gifts came about, the history of department store window displays, nostalgia for "old-fashioned Christmases" that were sometimes created fictions, and more, all liberally illustrated with vintage magazine ads and illustrations. I have to admit, one of the reasons I love this book is that it references St. Nicholas so much!—but the whole book is a wonderful cornucopia of treats in print.
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