Of Christmas as long, long ago is my new book arriving for the 2025 Christmas season.

Find out what Christmas was like centuries ago.

Sneak preview, it was weird, and spooky, and rowdy.

Kind of gross sometimes.

Find it wherever books are sold in hardcover from Lions Press and audiobook from recorded books.

It's Christmas as you've never seen it before, and it makes a great gift.

I'm Brian Earle. This is Christmas Past.

The match was struck in Sarajevo, but the Tinder had been piling up for years. Treaties, tensions, ambitions.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in June of 1914,

alliances snapped into place like trap springs.

Austria blamed Serbia. Russia backed Serbia. Germany pledged itself to Austria,

France to Russia. Then Germany swept through neutral Belgium to reach France, and Britain, bound

by treaty, stepped in. The machinery of war roared to life. And what might have been a regional quarrel became a

continental conflict. Then a world war, though they wouldn't call it that for some time.

The war that would end all wars had begun.

In the beginning, it didn't feel like the end of the world.

Young men sang songs on their way to the front, waving from train cars.

Uniforms were pressed, boots polished.

The war, they were told, would be over by Christmas.

It would be a quick campaign, a grand adventure, a test of courage, and a chance to

come home a hero. But by December the mud had swallowed their boots. The songs had thinned into

silence, and the adventure had turned to waiting, waiting for the next shell, the next

...