All Around the Year

Whether decorating Easter trees, observing the New Year's Eve ritual of the Hungry Hog Society, or celebrating Wagner's birthday by incinerating a model of Valhalla on an outdoor barbecue to the closing strains of "Gotterdammerung," Americans combine the traditional and the offbeat as they create new holidays and celebrate old ones. In All Around the Year, Jack Santino guides the reader through a variety of holidays, festivals, and life-cycle rituals and celebrations. Drawing from history, anthropology, popular culture, and folklore, Santino shows the intricate relationships between holidays and the roles of celebrations and rituals in people's lives. He combines scholarship, field research, and personal reminiscence in this highly readable account of a subject that constitutes a major dimension of our social lives. Nearly fifty illustrations depict holiday symbols and decorations both traditional and contemporary, from greeting cards to wreath-bedecked cars to restaurant menus.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fantasy, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.