Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh: A Christmas Chrestomathy

For over thirty years, Joseph Bottum has been writing widely acclaimed Christmas essays, columns, short stories, and carols for American magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, St. Augustine’s Press has gathered a selection of these classic pieces--with a vast range across the Christmas spectrum.

There’s the comic: ＂Tinsel. No one needs tinsel. Even the word is a tinselly kind of word.＂ There’s the sentimental: ＂Her hair was the same thin shade of gray as the weather-beaten pickets of the fence around her frozen garden.＂ There’s the reminiscent: ＂Christmas was books, and books Christmas, in those days now mostly washed down to the cold sea.＂ Along the way, there’s the theological, the learned, the mystical, and the musical.

＂Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art,＂ he writes in praise of mad and cluttered holidays. ＂Christmas will not be defined by our failures to apply its lessons and carols,＂ he explains about Yuletide poetry. To see these essays and short stories gathered in one place--in a beautiful illustrated edition from St. Augustine’s Press--is to see the whole of the vision that Joseph Bottum has been painting for decades: a picture of Christmas as a thin place in the wall between the natural and the numinous, where a burning grace slips into a cold winter world.

Joseph Bottum is one of the nation’s most widely ranging thinkers, with hundreds of essays, reviews, poems, and short stories in publications from the Atlantic to the Washington Post. His books include the sociological study, An Anxious Age, and Christopher Award-winning children’s verse. his popular writing extends to obituaries in The Times of London and #1- bestselling sports essays in Amazon’s Kindle singles series, with lyrics performed by singers from Nashville to Carnegie hall. A native of south Dakota, Bottum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and currently directs the Classics Institute, a think-tank at Dakota state university for the study of cyber-ethics.