In this sweeping, syncretic account of ancient winter rites, Pringle and Urann trace Christmas’s pagan inheritance with anthropological exuberance, where mistletoe is deadly, boars are solar, and the sun’s return is a matter of mythic urgency. Long before the birth of Christ, Yule was already ablaze with light, feasting, and the longing for resurrection.

Yule-tide in England evolved from Druidic ritual and Celtic mirth into centuries of roaring fires, wassail bowls, and lavish feasts that reached their zenith in the Tudor and Stuart courts, where mistletoe, mummers, and the boar’s head held symbolic sway. Though later tempered by Puritan austerity and modern restraint, England’s Christmas traditions remain steeped in a history of communal revelry, spiritual observance, and enduring seasonal superstition.

In Christmastide Customs, Bertha F. Herrick traces the rich tapestry of Christmas traditions across time and cultures, from Druidic rites and Bavarian superstitions to the English Lord of Misrule and the legends of Bethlehem. Blending folklore and ceremony, the piece reflects a nostalgic fascination with the sacred and strange roots of the holiday season.

In Christmas Eve and the Twelve Days, Clement A. Miles explores the supernatural richness and folkloric complexity of the holiday season, where saints and spirits, pagan remnants, and Christian rites mingle in a charged atmosphere of wonder and dread. From German Christkind figures and Slavic carols to Scandinavian trolls and Greek Kallikantzaroi, the Twelve Days emerge as a liminal time when the sacred and uncanny draw unusually close.

What begins as a record of courtroom defense becomes, in Mary Stuart’s own words, a final act of sovereign self-fashioning—at once wounded, regal, and devastatingly lucid. These addresses, drawn from the last days of her long captivity, reveal not only the makings of a martyr but the rhetorical precision of a woman who understood the stage upon which she was condemned to die.

Told in prose equal parts gossip sheet and tragic oratorio, Orr’s portrait of Marie Antoinette and Count Fersen is less a historical account than a romantic fever dream, where doomed grandeur, political inertia, and forbidden devotion converge in a Versailles already teetering toward ruin.

In this densely embroidered chronicle of midwinter rites, Charles Hardwick traces the roots of Yuletide and New Year custom, from wassail bowls and yule logs to pantomimes and prophetic mists, revealing a layered tapestry where Christian celebration interweaves with pagan fire-worship and Victorian social aspiration.

Clement A. Miles moves fluently between wassail bowls and boar-shaped loaves, herring salads and sacrificial cats, assembling a vivid ethnography of European Christmases where feasting and folk play linger as half-forgotten rites. At once meticulous and mythopoeic, he invites us to taste the sacred in the sugared, and to see in roast pigs and honeyed wafers the ghost of gods once fed.