Plough Monday
Or, how to follow the Christmas holiday with a festival of pranks, trick-or-treating, and drunken revelry.
A Holiday Pantomime
With origins in the theater of the early eighteenth century, “panto” remains a crucial element of the holiday season in Great Britain and Ireland.
A Tibetan Christmas
The story of Cizhong’s Catholic holiday festival began when French missionaries arrived in northwest Yunnan with plans to spread their faith across Tibet.
It’s Tough Work Being a Temporary Santa
Playing the role of a shopping mall Santa comes with challenges familiar to any gig worker, but the performers also see the job as carrying special meaning.
Annotations: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Scrooge became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.
Merry Christmas from The World
Festive poems from Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Yuki Hartman, Wang Ping, and more.
A Visit from La Befana
In the Catholic tradition, Epiphany is the day the Three Kings first met Baby Jesus. But in Italy, it’s also the day La Befana shows up with a basket of gifts.
Banning Christmas Dinner
Poor laws passed in Great Britain in the 1830s reversed a centuries-old tradition to forbid workhouses from serving roast beef and plum pudding at Christmas.
Fighting for the Right to Party at Christmas
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Reformed Kirk of Scotland tried to shut down holiday celebrations. The Scottish people didn’t give up easily.