The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays

by Anthony F. Aveni

What is the connection between May Day and the Statue of Liberty? Between ancient solstice fires and Fourth of July fireworks? Between St. Valentine, the Groundhog, and the Virgin Mary? Why do people behave so bawdily during Mardi Gras? How has the significance and celebration of Christmas changed over the centuries?

In The Book of the Year, Anthony Aveni offers fascinating answers to these questions and explains the many ways humans throughout time have tried to order and give meaning to time's passing. Aveni traces the origins of modern customs tied to seasonal holidays, exploring what we eat (the egg at Easter, chocolate on St. Valentine's Day), the games we play (bobbing for apples on Halloween, football on Thanksgiving), the rituals we perform (dancing around the Maypole, making New Year's resolutions), and the colorful cast of characters we invent to dramatize holidays (Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the witches and goblins of Halloween). Along the way, Aveni illuminates everything from the Jack 'O Lantern and our faith in the predictive power of animals to the ways in which Labor Day reflects the great medieval "time wars," when the newly invented clock first pitted labor against management. The calendar and its holidays, Aveni writes, function as "a kind of metronome that keeps the beat of human activity tuned to the manifold overlapping cycles of life," to the ebb and flow of birth, growth, decay, and death.

Vividly written, filled with facts both curious and astonishing, this engrossing book allows us to hear that beat more clearly and to understand more fully the rhythms we all dance to throughout the year.

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 2002

About the author

Anthony F. Aveni is Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy, Anthropology, and Native American Studies at Colgate University.

Reviews

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Publishers sometimes fear holiday books because their appeal is often limited to one season of the year. Most people aren’t thinking of Halloween in the spring, or Christmas in the summer. Still, the year is punctuated with holidays, and for some reason not too many books have been written about them. Anthony Aveni’s The Book of the Year is a brief study of holidays from the perspective of an astronomer and anthropologist. As the subtitle (A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays) makes clear, the volume isn’t intended to be comprehensive. At less than 200 pages it couldn’t be.

Holiday coverage here is somewhat uneven for the reason, mentioned on my blog post about the book (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World), that the author has a specialization in first nations. That means that in addition to the astronomical focus on seasonal holidays, there is also some consideration of Latin American traditions and their origins. I had found this book via a reference to Celtic holidays. Aveni covers these fairly well, but it shows that he’s not an ancient historian.

For getting a basic overview of the “wheel of the year,” this is a good introduction. It doesn’t cover religious or political holidays that have no connection with the seasonal cycle, although many are mentioned. Clearly the focus is on holidays linked to the larger agricultural year, particularly in the northern hemisphere. In that realm Aveni has much to share that is of interest. It’s a book that could profitably be read seasonally as readers’ interests in particular celebrations come to mind.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not sure if I was a bit disappointed by this book because the writing was a bit dull or if it was because it didn’t speak to the specific meanings/meaningfulness I want holidays to have. I know that every holiday is a mishmash, remnants of old folk traditions, religious ideas, and commercial opportunities pushed and pulled by what people wanted their “red letter days” to mean. In a lot of ways I love that about holidays. But I guess I wanted to hear more about the old traditions that I like the sound of and to have more certainty about what they meant, which just isn’t realistic.

Some of the chapters rambled off in directions I didn’t care about, but in the end the book was fairly interesting, just not quite as interesting or meaningful as I had hoped. That may reflect that this author wasn’t rewriting history to suit romantic notions of what the distant past was like but actually talking about what is known (and unknown) which I respect. He also covered more of the world than I was expecting, including Central and South American traditions, not just European ones.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I had a general idea of the origins of most of our modern holidays, I was looking for something to go a bit more in-depth on how celebrations and traditions have morphed, coalesced, and often been intentionally molded by those in power throughout the centuries. This book certainly offers that. However, this was a bit of a tedious read – I found myself skimming sections in search of the information in which I was interested.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decent text on the history of holidays, with several problems preventing it from being any more than decent.

More than anything, I found myself wishing each chapter had a more defined internal structure. It often felt like a stream-of-consciousness list of trivia, jumping from culture to culture, and at times even to personal anecdotes. For instance, despite the broadly cross-cultural approach apparent in the early chapters, essentially the entire Spring Equinox chapter is (jarringly) dedicated to the author's personal experience at Chichen Itza, and its relationship with Mayan cosmology and the modern desire to rediscover meaning in natural cycles – clearly the author's area of strongest interest and expertise, and perhaps one on which he should have focused more when selecting a topic for a monograph.

This book aims to relate scholarly content, but I think it goes too far in trying to be a "popular" read, and loses both coherence and depth as a result. Nevertheless, I can't deny there is some good information here overall, for those looking for it.

[Arthur George · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a useful introduction to the background of our seasonal holidays. It is written in colorful prose that is easy on the reader. It gives the reader a combination of some historical background to each holiday, combined with its more modern evolution. The author is an academic knowledgeable in the field, so what he says can be taken as more reliable than what we read in similar books by others. Readers doing more serious research into the topic, however, will find the book frustrating because it does not cite to sources of information except for quotes, because there are too many minor tangents, and because it is not that detailed and its information will quickly be duplicated and superseded by the other sources that a researcher consults. It would not be fair to rate a book according to criteria that deviate from what the book is designed to be, so in light of its fairly modest purpose and how it really did well at that, I give it 4 stars.

[Sandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tony Aveni is a Colgate professor. In this book he looks at the origins of holidays. It was a little disjointed.

[Peter Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is OK. But it has the feel of a series of articles that have been fleshed out for the sake of the book.

[Gwen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm really glad this one had a more neutral tone! I learned that "cereal" is named after the Goddess of the Harvest ("Ceres"). I wasn't too impressed with the section on Halloween, though, and actually enjoyed the sections on February, May Day, and Labor Day the most. I'm definitely glad to live in the time I live in now, where we have weekends, and don't necessarily work from sunup to sundown. Of course, I'd be happy if we had a four day work week like some other countries!