Book of Christmas: A Collection of Holiday Verse, Prose, and Carols - Debra Starr - Hardcover

Our Christmases are marked by tradition-holiday recipes, handed-down decorations, each family's particular ritual for trimming the tree. But most of all this season is defined for us by stories, in the carols, pageants, verse, and prose we've associated with this holiday since our childhoods. In their retellings of the first Christmas, and of the manifestations of its spirit throughout the ages, these stories carry within them our own Christmases past. The Book of Christmas gathers together those standards of the season's literature which no Christmas anthology would be complete without-among them, the gospels according to St. Matthew and St. Luke, a selection of carols, O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi," and Clement C. Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol appears here as well, in the abbreviated version the author himself created for use in his public readings of the work. Included also is a wide-ranging selection of verse by some of our greatest poets-Ben Johnson, William Wordsworth, George Herbert, and Robert Frost, among others-as well as prose favorites from American writers, Louisa May Alcott, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah Orne Jewett. The voices are varied, but the different musics of the book's three sections join in chorus, resounding like the bells in Tennyson's villages in "Voices in the Mist:" ...peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace Peace and goodwill to all mankind.Starr, Debra is the author of 'Book of Christmas: A Collection of Holiday Verse, Prose, and Carols - Debra Starr - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780681220041 and ISBN 068122004X.