This book talks about a handful of things—with schemes to trap and catch Santa Claus, looking at Christmas dinner from the point of view of the humble vegetable, lessons on Christmas history, parables about the folly of the Yuletide season, playing with the English language and showing how it breaks all its own rules, Australian political comment, introducing previously unknown Christmas characters, rants about capitalistic consumerism, and many other philosophical and hairbrained theories explained with humor and insight.

Part of the regionalist movement that included Grant Wood, Paul Engle, Hamlin Garland, and Jay G. Sigmund, James Hearst helped create what Iowa novelist Ruth Suckow called a poetry of place. A lifelong Iowa farner, Hearst began writing poetry at age nineteen and eventually wrote thirteen books of poems, a novel, short stories, cantatas, and essays, which gained him a devoted following Many of his poems were published in the regionalist periodicals of the time, including the Midland, and by the great regional presses, including Carroll Coleman's Prairie Press. Drawing on his experiences as a farmer, Hearst wrote with a distinct voice of rural life and its joys and conflicts, of his own battles with physical and emotional pain (he was partially paralyzed in a farm accident), and of his own place in the world. His clear eye offered a vision of the midwestern agrarian life that was sympathetic but not sentimental - a people and an art rooted in place.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.