Rudolph Day, September 2022

"Rudolph Day" is a way of keeping the Christmas spirit alive all year long. You can read a Christmas book, work on a Christmas craft project, listen to Christmas music or watch a Christmas movie. This month I've had an ARC to read!

Christmas Past, Brian Earl
Brian Earl has been doing the "Christmas Past" podcast for five years now; it's an enjoyable excursion into the traditions of the Yuletide season. Coming soon is this new book that distills some of his most popular episodes into print.

The book, which I assume is in color, rather than the black and white version presented in the Advance Reader Copy PDF, is excellent for a gift book for someone who's curious about where our Christmas customs come from. I have several books like this (Ace Collins, Clement Miles, Tanya Gulevich, etc.), but this has updated information and also includes modern traditions—most prominently about classic television Christmas animation, but the chapter about the snow globes was fascinating, too.

As Earl points out, a lot of the traditions go back so far that it's difficult to track down exactly where they started. However, I am puzzled by his chapter on "The Twelve Days of Christmas." It is indeed a "forfeit" song, sung for party games, not a Christian metaphor, and I remember singing about "colly birds" (rather than "calling birds") from when I learned the song in the 1960s, but at one point it states "On days six through nine, we have pipers piping and drummers drumming." Actually day six is the geese and day seven is the swans, it's days eight through twelve that are interpreted as other things than birds. (Hallmark's answer to the "five golden rings" in their recent "12 Days of Christmas" ornament set was to make the fifth day a ring-necked pheasant.) I'm not sure how that error made it into the book.

Otherwise, if you've never read a book about the history of Christmas, this is a good place to start; Earl has a nice chatty writing style, and the book is supplemented with illustrations and photographs and cheery graphics.