“The Christmas Tree,” after Winslow Homer, Harper’s Weekly, 25 Dec. 1858. Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

Christmas is almost upon us and, frankly, I’ve been too busy—and too tired—this month to write much for the blog. It’s certainly not for lack of topics or sources. I have the beginnings of over 60 [sic!] blog posts sketched out already, and a huge pile of fascinating documents and images set aside to illustrate those posts. The amount of interesting material is daunting, and organizing each topic into one or more coherent posts takes time and energy that have been hard to come by these past few months. Now it’s late December and I’m looking forward to visits from family that will keep me happily preoccupied until early January.

I’ll be back with new material after the New Year. In the meanwhile, below are links to a few holiday-themed favorites from past years for your (re-)reading pleasure. I hope you enjoy them. And in 2026, I look forward to an exciting (and more consistently productive!) year of discoveries here at Clark House Historian.

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