A beautifully told celebration of heritage, hope, and holiday spirit.
“Christmas has always been a mirror of who we are,” writes Tabler in his latest, a book that’s less a scholarly study than a fond, finely detailed stroll through the state’s holiday past. A historian by training but a storyteller at heart, Tabler takes readers from the first Swedish settlers lighting candles in Fort Christina to modern multicultural celebrations, showing how one small state made the season distinctly its own.
Delaware’s Christmas, as he reveals, is no single story. The Swedish Luciafest at Old Swedes Church glows beside the Dutch Sinterklaas and Anglican evergreens that once brightened Wilmington sanctuaries. He gives moving attention to the Antebellum Black Christmas, where joy flickered amid oppression, and to churches like Peter Spencer’s Union Church of Africans, which offered both worship and resistance. His sense of balance (between sacred and secular, celebration and survival) adds quiet gravity to what might have been simple nostalgia.
Tabler’s eye for texture brings history alive: Sussex County’s mistletoe pickers scaling trees with hickory poles, the holly wreath makers who crowned Delaware “The Land of Holly,” and the canned plum puddings of Dover’s Richardson & Robbins factory that carried Victorian sweetness across America. He doesn’t overlook quirk or invention; lawn trees, handbell choirs, even IBM punch-card wreaths, all proof that Christmas continually reinvents itself. With crisp, humane prose and a folklorist’s curiosity, Tabler turns archives into atmosphere and local memory into living tradition. Photographs, archival notes, and historical references enrich the reading experience.
A heartfelt homage to tradition, community, and the enduring magic of Christmas.
Pub date July 4, 2025
ASIN B0F4NJ2KTZ
Price $9.99 (USD) Kindle edition
