Christmas in Iowa

By Clarence Andrews

Book Overview

1979 Midwest Heritage Publishing Company HB, stated 1st edition, stated 2nd printing. Clarence Andrews (A Literary History of Iowa, Growing Up in Iowa) tells stories of pioneer celebrations, Moravian,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0934582009
• ISBN13: 9780934582001
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Midwest Heritage Pub. Co
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Celebrations of Christmas with familial rather than religious or economic fervor

This book is a collection of Christmas stories that take you back to a much simpler time. While the people were poorer in the monetary sense, they were richer in the social and familial senses. You will not read about people scrambling from store to store in order to identify and purchase gifts. All of the Christmas gifts you read about in this book were simple, yet deeply appreciated. Most striking is the repeated mention of oranges, specifically that they were such a treat that the recipient ate only one a year, the one they found in their stocking on Christmas morning. The main theme is about community and family, how people got together and enjoyed the season and the company. Large extended families came together, almost always at Grandma's and ate more than is humanly possible. Some of the Christmas tales in this book are from the early days of statehood for Iowa and give you a glimpse into how the people lived their lives. I enjoyed reading this book, it demonstrates the true spirit of Christmas and how it really should be celebrated, not with religious or economic but with familial fervor.

Get into the Spirit!

Christmas in the Midwest! the very best of all! From Chicago's Miracle Mile with its myriad of gaily colored lights and its blazing store windows - to the small midwest cities with their downtown lampposts festooned with evergreen and silvery tinsel - to the small towns with their Season's Greetings bannered across the intersection of Main and Elm Streets - to the farm scenes with strings of red and green bulbs entwined round the spindly legs of long-unused windmills and the picture window curtains drawn back to let the tree lights gleam out over the new fallen snow.And Christmas Eve in little frame and brick churches with "readings" and songs by the children - a decorated tree and some rosy-faced neighbor in a Santa Claus costume - Christmas mornings with families round the tree and the gaily wrapped gifts with their promises waiting to be unwrapped.And then go over the hill to Grandma's house where all the aunts, uncles and cousins gathered for a gala Christmas feast!These are images and recollections that M idwesterners and exiled Midwesterners share. You will find these memories and more in the pages of Christmas in the Midwest. Here is a rich assortment in poem, picture, and story, all done by the best of midwest writers and artists such as, Hamlin Garland, Bess Streeter Aldrich, James Whitcomb Riley, John Muir, Marjorie Holmes, Paul Engle, Hartzell Spence, Phil Stong and Susan Allen Toth. They share stories about the Midwest's very first Christmases, Christmases of the pioneers, and Christmases in this changing twenty-first century. Wether the stories and poems are real or imagined, or mixtures of memory and "might-have-been," this collection is guaranteed to stir heartwarming memories of Christmas in the Midwest, and the spirit of the season everywhere.