All Around the Year

Whether they're decorating Easter trees or celebrating Wagner's birthday by playing recordings of his Ring cycle operas and incinerating a model of Valhalla on an outdoor barbecue to the closing strains of "Gotterdamerung," Americans know both how to create and how to celebrate holidays! Jack Santino's guide to such frivolity is a wonderfully readable exploration of holidays, periods of festivity, and life-cycle rituals and celebrations. Santino draws on history, anthropology, popular culture, and folklore to show the intricate relationships between holidays and the roles that celebrations and rituals play in people's lives. Jack Santino, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green University, is the author of Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters and Halloween and Other Festivities of Death and Life.