Christmas in Connecticut!

These words immediately evoke warm images of stained-glass churches on snow-blanketed town greens, merry bands of roving carolers, sleigh bells ringing in the icy night, and candlelit fir trees decorated with popcorn and cranberries. Such a romantic world, a glittering Christmas card now vanished into the past, comes to life in this new collection of stories, poems, and sermons--forgotten writings that document Christmas as a much-loved tradition from the late 1700s until World War I.

Puritan Connecticut not only ignored the holiday but made it illegal, yet by the 1850s Christmas in Connecticut was not only legal but a festive time of illuminated trees, colorful presents, Santa Claus, lavish family feasts, and quiet homilies about the birth of Christ in a Bethlehem manger.

These early writings by Connecticut-born writers, like Harriet Beecher Stowe--mostly sentimental, often maudlin, but oddly quaint and sometimes surprisingly charming--have mostly disappeared into the dustbins of old bookstores. Now this lost, distant world reemerges. Outside it's snowing, the stockings hang on the fireplace mantel, and it's finally Christmas Eve. It's time for a little old-fashioned holiday storytelling.