Description
For over thirty years, Joseph Bottum has been writing widely acclaimed Christmas essays, columns, short stories, and carols for American magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, St. Augustine's Press has gathered a selection of these classic pieceswith a vast range across the Christmas spectrum. There's the comic: Tinsel. No one needs tinsel. Even the word is a tinselly kind of word. There's the sentimental: Her hair was the same thin shade of gray as the weather-beaten pickets of the fence around her frozen garden. There's the reminiscent: Christmas was books, and books Christmas, in those days now mostly washed down to the cold sea. Along the way, there's the theological, the learned, the mystical, and the musical. Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art, he writes in praise of mad and cluttered holidays. Christmas will not be defined by our failures to apply its lessons and carols, he explains about Yuletide poetry. To see these essays and short stori
