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Christmas Remembered
Ben Logan won the hearts of readers the world over with his 1975 memoir, The Land Remembers. He returns to the farmland of his youth in Christmas Remembered, a loving tribute to holiday rituals and the people who make them people like his mother, who was married on Christmas Day, and people like his wife, who brought her own traditions from the mountains of Mexico. “Rituals do not persist simply because they may possess a magical power from outside us,” Logan tells us. “They live because they touch something inside us that is wanting and waiting to come out and express itself.”
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With a new foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Christmas Remembered will make you laugh and cryâ and grow nostalgic for your own holiday seasons past.
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With a new foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Christmas Remembered will make you laugh and cryâ and grow nostalgic for your own holiday seasons past.
- GenresChristmasNonfiction
160 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1997
3 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 27, 2020
Having read The Land Remembers, I knew what I was going to read in Mr. Logan’s Christmas memoir. Revisiting Logan’s love of the family farm and a bygone era was a pleasure during the wintry month of December. Some of the vignettes were lifted directly from his larger memoir, but the stories and emotions are so sweet, I didn’t mind another dip in that pool. Charming and nostalgic.
November 27, 2022
This book was recommended to me by a dear friend who lives in Wisconsin- where this book is set. I was excited for the recommendation and hopeful to find a new Christmas favorite to add to my collection!
The book starts with the author trying to find Christmas again. He starts getting fragmented memories of past Christmases coming back to him. This led me to think of my own past! Fragments of my Christmas past: Turning the corner from the kitchen to the living room with hot chocolate in my hands- feeling the warm because my dad had made a fire in the fireplace, and seeing a Christmas show was on the TV. Going to my grandma Hammers’ house on Christmas morning and opening gifts with her and my aunts and uncle. Taking photos for our Christmas cards. Decorating Christmas cookies with Mom. Singing for the elderly in an old folks home with my Girl Scout troop. Making Kellogg’s wreath treats with Red Hots in the Laurel Elementary cafeteria. Seeing Grandma Brown’s stockings hanging in her house- one for each child and grandchild! Visiting Santa in the mall, watching Christmas specials and commercials (Hersheys bells are some of my favorites!). So many memories come flooding back! ❤️
The book also harkened to the Christmas memories of others, which I thought was something interesting to think about: “Even when I was young, Christmas was already a time of memory. It reached back beyond my birth. I could see earlier Christmases in the way Mother hung a favorite, faded ornament on the tree, the way Father’s face softened when he sang a Christmas Carol in Norwegian, and in stories told by my three older brothers.”
The writer touched on an interesting thought when he said “…I was very young and Christmas was still more things than spirit to me.” When did Christmas become less things and more spirit to me? This book “inceptioned me” to bring out my beeswax candle and light it up as I read.
I laughed out loud in the chapter about the presents not coming, when the cat “played with the strings of popcorn and berries, was chased away, then came sneaking back to pounce and be chased away again.” I can see that play out in my mind and it makes me giggle! Oh, cats!
I thought how nice the gift-less Christmas turned out: reading aloud Christmas letters from people far away, fixing Christmas dinner together, eating fresh sugar cookies, and reminiscing about past Christmases as one son played guitar. A nice white tablecloth with lace at the ends was spread out over the table, showing the special event that it was. This scene kind of makes me want to write some Christmas letters! I will channel that when I go to write out Christmas cards for the seniors in our community. ❤️
Hearing about the death of the writer’s mother in chapter 6 saddened me. He wrote of how a piece of Christmas magic went with her. I felt the loss as he described the first Christmas without her- how painful! His mother had the talent of being able to lighten and brighten their lives, of keeping the spirit of Christmas alive. “Men play Santa Claus. Women are Santa Claus.”
The chapter about when he was in Mexico reminded me of anxiety and other mental health disorders: “Wars can begin instantly. Peace cannot. We carry our war onward inside us and what we call peace is an eerie quiet where there is too much time to think and remember.”
I liked reading through the chapters and hearing the colorful Christmas memories from different parts of Ben’s life- from childhood, to the military, post-military bachelorhood, to Christmases with his own family made with Jacqueline. I especially liked hearing that they were able to retain a meaningful piece of Christmas past by using an ancient seal found at Jacqueline’s grandmother’s Mexican ranch as a stamper to place a design on a certain type of Christmas cookie. ❤️
The Christmas memories with Ben’s wife & kids reminds me of many Christmas movies! 🤗 Jacqueline bringing out the tray of banana bread and hot chocolate on Christmas morning, Ben lighting the tabletop candles and candles on the tree. “The children stood there for a moment, staring around the room that was lighted only by the candles, the fireplace and the small kerosene lamp, as though wanting to preserve that collective image of Christmas morning.” It is crazy that the gift giving lasted all day in their house! They savored it, opening gifts one-by-one, watching “the unveiling and the response.” There was a pause when everyone helped get Christmas dinner to the table. Storytelling occurred over the meal about Christmases past. Then after the gifts were all opened, they’d head out to play in the snow, deliver some cookies, and gather up some firewood as a family. ❤️
The book came full circle and next told of another Christmas from Ben’s boyhood in Wisconsin. The students put on a school program the evening before Christmas break. Oh the shenanigans that went on that night! So many things went less-than-perfect, but everyone still had a great time, and a good laugh! It was entertaining to read about! After the program, women made coffee & hot cocoa. They also had “about a hundred different kinds of cookies that were shaped like stars, trees and bells, most of them covered with bright-colored sugar.” This reminds me of the cookies we’ve made with my mom using her mom’s recipe! It also reminds me of the night I visited with Aunt Dean and we decorated sugar cookies together in “the new house” during my college days.❤️
That same chapter told of Ben’s brother’s illness (Scarlet Fever), and how close to death he was. It pleasantly amazed me how one stranger’s simple act of kindness could make such a difference for this family! A man in a stocking cap with a pack on his back was walking along. He waved at the boys and simply yet kindly shouted “Merry Christmas!” I guess he resembled Santa, which got the boys thinking that they needed to tell their sick brother about it, and give him the gift he had wanted. The room and circumstance looked bleak, but once their story was told and the gift delivered, their brother recovered within a week! It reminds me how small, seemingly insignificant, acts of kindness can go on to impact many people! 🤗
As the book wound down, intriguing ideas crept out at me: “…could I keep from mixing up the me of childhood and me of now? Of course I could not. I am both. I am every age I have ever been.” ☺️ “I know there is something in Christmas, fragile as the laughter of children, that wakens the sleeping goodness in us, making it easier to feel, show and say ‘I love you.’” 🤗 “I owe much to many people, debts I will never pay except in how I live my life.” ❤️ “Now I realized that I only remembered through their remembering…To keep Christmas safe from careless change and the tarnish of forgetting, I must keep remembering to remember.” 🥰 “…memory stores what touches us strongly on a feeling level. Feelings defy time. They can be recovered.” “We do not lose people who have been part of us.”
He spoke of people “weary of city tempos that leave little time for reflection,” how they want to “recover some of the lifestyle” of families working together and neighbors forming a community. He said that trying to recapture the old ways/pastoral lifestyle too literally will lead to disappointment. But those who are realistic about it “want to learn from the past and then find new ways to be closer as families and to form community.” I like that idea.
Ben also spoke of storytelling in the afterword, and how important it is: “They make me realize how rarely Americans tell their own stories now that we have allowed entertainment television to speak for us. That is a loss we are paying for. Authentic storytelling…celebrates the everyday lives of ordinary people whose stories tell me they are not ordinary at all.” This makes me want to listen to my dad’s stories more.
The book starts with the author trying to find Christmas again. He starts getting fragmented memories of past Christmases coming back to him. This led me to think of my own past! Fragments of my Christmas past: Turning the corner from the kitchen to the living room with hot chocolate in my hands- feeling the warm because my dad had made a fire in the fireplace, and seeing a Christmas show was on the TV. Going to my grandma Hammers’ house on Christmas morning and opening gifts with her and my aunts and uncle. Taking photos for our Christmas cards. Decorating Christmas cookies with Mom. Singing for the elderly in an old folks home with my Girl Scout troop. Making Kellogg’s wreath treats with Red Hots in the Laurel Elementary cafeteria. Seeing Grandma Brown’s stockings hanging in her house- one for each child and grandchild! Visiting Santa in the mall, watching Christmas specials and commercials (Hersheys bells are some of my favorites!). So many memories come flooding back! ❤️
The book also harkened to the Christmas memories of others, which I thought was something interesting to think about: “Even when I was young, Christmas was already a time of memory. It reached back beyond my birth. I could see earlier Christmases in the way Mother hung a favorite, faded ornament on the tree, the way Father’s face softened when he sang a Christmas Carol in Norwegian, and in stories told by my three older brothers.”
The writer touched on an interesting thought when he said “…I was very young and Christmas was still more things than spirit to me.” When did Christmas become less things and more spirit to me? This book “inceptioned me” to bring out my beeswax candle and light it up as I read.
I laughed out loud in the chapter about the presents not coming, when the cat “played with the strings of popcorn and berries, was chased away, then came sneaking back to pounce and be chased away again.” I can see that play out in my mind and it makes me giggle! Oh, cats!
I thought how nice the gift-less Christmas turned out: reading aloud Christmas letters from people far away, fixing Christmas dinner together, eating fresh sugar cookies, and reminiscing about past Christmases as one son played guitar. A nice white tablecloth with lace at the ends was spread out over the table, showing the special event that it was. This scene kind of makes me want to write some Christmas letters! I will channel that when I go to write out Christmas cards for the seniors in our community. ❤️
Hearing about the death of the writer’s mother in chapter 6 saddened me. He wrote of how a piece of Christmas magic went with her. I felt the loss as he described the first Christmas without her- how painful! His mother had the talent of being able to lighten and brighten their lives, of keeping the spirit of Christmas alive. “Men play Santa Claus. Women are Santa Claus.”
The chapter about when he was in Mexico reminded me of anxiety and other mental health disorders: “Wars can begin instantly. Peace cannot. We carry our war onward inside us and what we call peace is an eerie quiet where there is too much time to think and remember.”
I liked reading through the chapters and hearing the colorful Christmas memories from different parts of Ben’s life- from childhood, to the military, post-military bachelorhood, to Christmases with his own family made with Jacqueline. I especially liked hearing that they were able to retain a meaningful piece of Christmas past by using an ancient seal found at Jacqueline’s grandmother’s Mexican ranch as a stamper to place a design on a certain type of Christmas cookie. ❤️
The Christmas memories with Ben’s wife & kids reminds me of many Christmas movies! 🤗 Jacqueline bringing out the tray of banana bread and hot chocolate on Christmas morning, Ben lighting the tabletop candles and candles on the tree. “The children stood there for a moment, staring around the room that was lighted only by the candles, the fireplace and the small kerosene lamp, as though wanting to preserve that collective image of Christmas morning.” It is crazy that the gift giving lasted all day in their house! They savored it, opening gifts one-by-one, watching “the unveiling and the response.” There was a pause when everyone helped get Christmas dinner to the table. Storytelling occurred over the meal about Christmases past. Then after the gifts were all opened, they’d head out to play in the snow, deliver some cookies, and gather up some firewood as a family. ❤️
The book came full circle and next told of another Christmas from Ben’s boyhood in Wisconsin. The students put on a school program the evening before Christmas break. Oh the shenanigans that went on that night! So many things went less-than-perfect, but everyone still had a great time, and a good laugh! It was entertaining to read about! After the program, women made coffee & hot cocoa. They also had “about a hundred different kinds of cookies that were shaped like stars, trees and bells, most of them covered with bright-colored sugar.” This reminds me of the cookies we’ve made with my mom using her mom’s recipe! It also reminds me of the night I visited with Aunt Dean and we decorated sugar cookies together in “the new house” during my college days.❤️
That same chapter told of Ben’s brother’s illness (Scarlet Fever), and how close to death he was. It pleasantly amazed me how one stranger’s simple act of kindness could make such a difference for this family! A man in a stocking cap with a pack on his back was walking along. He waved at the boys and simply yet kindly shouted “Merry Christmas!” I guess he resembled Santa, which got the boys thinking that they needed to tell their sick brother about it, and give him the gift he had wanted. The room and circumstance looked bleak, but once their story was told and the gift delivered, their brother recovered within a week! It reminds me how small, seemingly insignificant, acts of kindness can go on to impact many people! 🤗
As the book wound down, intriguing ideas crept out at me: “…could I keep from mixing up the me of childhood and me of now? Of course I could not. I am both. I am every age I have ever been.” ☺️ “I know there is something in Christmas, fragile as the laughter of children, that wakens the sleeping goodness in us, making it easier to feel, show and say ‘I love you.’” 🤗 “I owe much to many people, debts I will never pay except in how I live my life.” ❤️ “Now I realized that I only remembered through their remembering…To keep Christmas safe from careless change and the tarnish of forgetting, I must keep remembering to remember.” 🥰 “…memory stores what touches us strongly on a feeling level. Feelings defy time. They can be recovered.” “We do not lose people who have been part of us.”
He spoke of people “weary of city tempos that leave little time for reflection,” how they want to “recover some of the lifestyle” of families working together and neighbors forming a community. He said that trying to recapture the old ways/pastoral lifestyle too literally will lead to disappointment. But those who are realistic about it “want to learn from the past and then find new ways to be closer as families and to form community.” I like that idea.
Ben also spoke of storytelling in the afterword, and how important it is: “They make me realize how rarely Americans tell their own stories now that we have allowed entertainment television to speak for us. That is a loss we are paying for. Authentic storytelling…celebrates the everyday lives of ordinary people whose stories tell me they are not ordinary at all.” This makes me want to listen to my dad’s stories more.
December 27, 2015
This isn't the most exciting Christmas book as it mostly occurs on a farm in Wisconsin. However, it is a good collection of Christmas memories of the author from the 1920s-1940s. I particularly liked the chapter about Santa being a woman as moms really tend to be behind most of the Xmas magic (although I know it's not always the case). After his mother dies, he highlights how the holiday changes for his family as they no longer have her holiday lead to follow.
December 17, 2009
3 1/2 stars. I love this author's book, "The Land Remembers." This one isn't as good, but still enjoyable. The best parts were his memories of his boyhood.
December 20, 2025
Melancholy story that’s bittersweet. I loved Ben Logan’s “The Land Remembers”. This one is different in that it’s more reflective and the tone is heavier.
June 27, 2022
Wonderfully lyrical, beautiful prose, one of the best!
December 21, 2014
My favorite line in this book went something to the effect of "Santa Claus must be a woman." The author emphasizes how it is always the women's hard work that makes Christmas so special for everyone else. How true!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews