The Battle for Christmas

**PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • Drawing on a wealth of research, this fascinating book ( *The New York Times Book Review)* charts the invention of our current Yuletide traditions, from St. Nicholas to the Christmas tree and, perhaps most radically, the practice of giving gifts to children. ** Anyone who laments the excesses of Christmas might consider the Puritans of colonial Massachusetts: they simply outlawed the holiday. The Puritans had their reasons, since Christmas was once an occasion for drunkenness and riot, when poor wassailers extorted food and drink from the well-to-do. In this intriguing and innovative work of social history, Stephen Nissenbaum rediscovers Christmas’s carnival origins and shows how it was transformed, during the nineteenth century, into a festival of domesticity and consumerism. Bursting with detail, filled with subversive readings of such seasonal classics as A Visit from St. Nicholas” and *A Christmas Carol* , *The Battle for Christmas* captures the glorious strangeness of the past even as it helps us better understand our present.