William writes a letter home each of the twelve days he spends exploring Virginia at Christmastime, as his cousin Madison shows him everything from a cardinal in a dogwood tree to eight bluegrass fiddlers fiddling to twelve Eastern Shore plovers looping. Includes facts about Virginia.
Jacob writes a letter home each of the twelve days he spends exploring Georgia at Christmastime, as his cousin Ava shows him everything from a brown thrasher in a live oak tree to twelve bouncing kangaroos. Includes facts about Georgia.
Jane Austen turns sleuth in this delightful murder mystery set over the twelve days of a Regency-Era Christmas party. Christmas Eve, 1814: Jane Austen has been invited to spend the holiday with family and friends at The Vyne, the gorgeous ancestral home of the wealthy and politically prominent Chute family. As the year fades and friends begin to gather beneath the mistletoe for the twelve days of Christmas festivities, Jane and her circle are in a celebratory mood: Mansfield Park is selling nicely; Napoleon has been banished to Elba; British forces have seized Washington, DC; and on Christmas Eve, John Quincy Adams signs the Treaty of Ghent, which will end a war nobody in England really wanted. Jane, however, discovers holiday cheer is fleeting. One of the Yuletide revelers dies in a tragic accident, which Jane immediately views with suspicion. If the accident was in fact murder, the killer is one of Jane’s fellow snow-bound guests. With clues scattered amidst cleverly crafted charades, dark secrets coming to light during parlor games, and old friendships returning to haunt the Christmas parties, whom can Jane trust to help her discover the truth and stop the killer from striking again?
On each of the twelve days before her Christmas visit, Emma's cousin Jake sends her a letter describing the history, geography, animals, and interesting sites of Wisconsin. Uses the cumulative pattern of the traditional carol to present amusing state trivia at the end of each letter.
Native American Twelve Days of Christmas delightfully adapts the traditional English Christmas carol with items and traditions found in many Native American tribes.
The song “The 12 Days of Christmas” is a mainstay of the holiday season, but the practice of celebrating Christmas as a twelve-day festival fell out of fashion long ago in most cultures. In Celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas, author Chris Marchand explores the history behind the season and individual feast days from December 25 to January 6, and then offers suggestions for how you can celebrate it with your family, church, or community. Along with this, he provides answers to many of the nagging questions surrounding the holiday, such as the history behind the twelve-days song, why December 25 was chosen as the date, and what to do about its supposedly pagan origins. The challenge before us is to first help people see Christmas as a holiday that begins, rather than ends, on December 25, and then to together figure out how to reinvent Christmas in the present by learning how it was celebrated in the past.