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Please Discuss

Spirit of Christmas past

  December 25, 2011

In Please Discuss, Katharine Whittemore looks at a handful of Christmas books: John F. Kelly’s history “The Origins of Christmas’’; David Sedaris’s comic autobiographical essays “Holidays on Ice’’; the anthology “Christmas at the New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art’’; historian David McCullough’s examination of speeches by FDR and Winston Churchill, weeks after Pearl Harbor, “In the Dark Streets Shineth: A 1941 Christmas Story’’; and Truman Capote’s memoir “A Christmas Memory.’’

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