Christmas

"If you read enough sources, you run into cases of slaves spending a lot of time over Christmas crying."

Pheasants? 'Dickory dock'? Toyland? Here's how a narrow slice of American history changed the holidays forever.

A brief history of the Yuletide in America.

It was less about their asceticism and more about rejecting the world they had fled.

Long before “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” holiday songs played a part in the War on Christmas.

Hint: the Puritans were involved.

But maybe those midcentury classics weren't really Christmas songs at all.

The battle between "Happy Holidays" and "Merry Christmas" goes way deeper than you think.

How postwar Christmas embraced spaceships, nukes, and cellophane.

There are two critical periods for Christmas. One is the Victorian era. The other is the 1960s.

Tracing the evolution of Christmas from a drunken carnival to the peaceful, family-oriented, consumeristic ritual we celebrate today.

Marine archaeologists are beginning to understand what really happened to Captain Santa's ill-fated ship, nicknamed the Christmas Tree Boat.

The troubled history of the famous poinsettia plant.

What were Americans' immediate responses to "A Christmas Carol," and how did Dickens' reading tours and eventual death reshape its meaning?

Jews from the Ottoman Empire pioneered the Christmas lights market a century ago — but nativism, antisemitism and islamophobia obscured this history.

People have been drinking eggnog for hundreds of years. Here's where it originated and how it became a traditional holiday drink.

Stories of 1776 and Santa Claus.

Christmas starts earlier every year — or does it?

The Christmas classic, released 75 years ago, conveys many messages beyond having faith in one another.

Muscular Christianity — with scriptural interpretations that can favor “stand your ground” over “turn the other cheek” — has a long tradition in the U.S.