Canadian Christmas Traditions: Festive Recipes and Stories from Coast to Coast

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Mandryk has produced a reference resource that will be invaluable to
grade-school teachers, newspaper columnists, and others who feel the
need to recount the origins and history of Christmas symbols and
traditions as practised in Canada today.

The work is comprehensive, including dozens of seasonal touchstones:
Santa, candles, cookies, holly, mistletoe, yule logs, trees, presents,
bells, carols, ornaments, stockings, snowmen, cards, nutcrackers, and
much more. If it has to do with Christmas, it’s included. There’s a
discussion of reindeer names, a section on the evolution of the crиche,
a review of Boxing Day myths, even an excursion into the origin of
Groundhog Day.

The relentless onslaught of detailed explanations of the origins of
various Christmas symbols is interrupted by a small collection of
seasonal recipes with an international and Canadian regional focus:
mulled claret, Jiggs dinner, tourtiиre, wassail, stolen, marzipan, etc.
While providing a welcome break from the avalanche of Christmas data,
even these 48 recipes cannot dilute the sense of excess generated by the
main text. While monotonous reading, it would be a good reference work
if it were indexed. Unfortunately, that’s one detail that’s missing.