Delaware at Christmas
The First State in a Merry State
Establishing Delaware’s influential place on the Christmas stage across the country, Delaware at Christmas is a celebratory history text.
The rich, varied features of the holiday season are dissected in Dave Tabler’s studious history book Delaware at Christmas.
Drawing on historical records, this book is a robust cornucopia of foundational facts about trends that defined Christmas holiday traditions in Delaware. It is packed with revealing photographs, cartoons, artwork, and advertising ephemera that guide the chronology of the holiday season’s secular and religious cultural trajectory. It begins by exploring the cultural traditions of Delaware’s immigrant communities in the colonial period, establishing crucial epochal context about how German, Orthodox Christian, and Dutch influences resulted in an amalgamation of global traditions.
Through food, song, consumerist sidebars, and forgotten traditions, the book casts a wide net for Delaware’s influential place on the Christmas stage across the country. Eye-opening passages concerning alternative holiday libations, such as syllabub, flip, and sack posset are given as much attention as the origins of eggnog as a palliative drink. Delaware’s other specific contributions include the omnipresence of Richardson & Robbins Plum Pudding during the nineteenth century, displacing traditional British plum and fig puddings as the de facto king of holiday desserts, and the proliferation of Kwanzaa in Delaware.
Throughout, the book illuminates Delaware’s important role as an incubator for the evolution of multicultural traditions from the seventeenth century onward. Highlighting a variety of cultural and social evolutions, as well as navigating the impact of World War II and the place of technology and communications in the arc of holiday celebrations, the result is a fantastic primer that takes a fun and educational traipse through evolving Christmas traditions. And while the pages reflect an obvious affinity for Delaware, the inclusion of nostalgic memories (as with a chapter on the bygone presence of toy trains under Christmas trees and a section on Delaware native Harold E. Follett’s short-lived Christmas toy invention, the ThunderStreak) is appealing.
The book remarks on contemporary sustainability and environmental influences that shape yuletide practices across generations with clarity and celebrates the ingenuity of Delaware citizens in embracing numerous flexible traditions. These habits imbue its brief pages with a sense of unabashed home-state pride while generating general curiosity about the state’s diversity, which is shown to have informed the way US Christmas traditions unfolded across the centuries.
A fascinating regional holiday history text, Delaware at Christmas explores the First State’s enduring influence on, and participation in, the diverse traditions of the holiday season.
Reviewed by
Ryan Prado
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
