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 sun goes down, and the gas lights come on. The dark, the cold, the slushy thoroughfares

and fitful gusts of wind, none of it could stop the bustle and hum of Christmas time in New York

City in 1882. Warm hearts beat under wool coats as shoppers jostle between market stalls,

where turkey and sugar-cured

hams hung from hooks, where apples gleam like ornaments, where Christmas trees pile high

in green drifts and wreaths overflow from wooden carts. The train stations double as makeshift

bazaars, the air thick with roasted chestnuts and pine needles,

the voices of peddlers rising above the steam and shuffle of travelers.

Away from the market squares in Manhattan's Murray Hill neighborhood is a townhouse.

Cozy, lived in, the home of a prosperous family, decorated for the season and alive with the anticipation of the family's three young children.

The parlor is bathed in a strange, steady glow. A fire blazes in the grate, but it doesn't crackle, doesn't snap, doesn't shift.

It gives off no warmth, only light. On closer inspection,

the fire is nothing more than colored paper, the illusion made real by electric light glowing

from underneath. Broadway and Fifth Avenue had recently installed newfangled electric street

lamps. The rest of the city streets,

the ones that were lit at all anyway, remained in the amber glow of gas and oil. But electricity,

...