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Tag: Christmas

The Perfect Gift

It’s Christmas Day, and Shelley Fraser Mickle reminds us that some of the most precious gifts we can give are the ones that don’t cost anything. 

Dickens’s Other Christmas Carols

Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Dickens-Christmas-Carosl.mp3 Author Rita Smith Air Date 12/24/2001 Dickens’s Other Christmas Carols Transcript Charles Dickens is intimately associated with our ideas of Christmas through his novels and through a series of books which have become known as the Christmas Books. The first of them, the familiar A Christmas Carol, was written […]

Books, Books, Books

Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Books-Books-Books.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 12/17/2001 Books, Books, Books Transcript This holiday season, I’m giving books of poetry as presents for everyone. After the events of September 11th, we have turned to poetry (or perhaps I should say we have returned to poetry) because it is the literary form […]

Johnny Marks

Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Johnny-Marks.mp3 Author Kevin Shortsleeve Air Date 12/13/2001 Johnny Marks Transcript Christmas music, as we know it, would not be the same were it not for songwriter, Johnny Marks. His Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and other Christmas hits have become the audio equivalent to Christmas stockings and candy canes. Born […]

Unlikely Origins of Popular Toys

With the holidays approaching, Kevin Shortsleeve has been looking at toys and some of the unlikely origins of our favorite playthings.

National Whiner’s Day

Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/National-Whiners-Day.mp3 Author Heather Tomasello Air Date 12/26/2000 National Whiner’s Day Transcript Today is National Whiner’s Day — sadly, often an all too appropriate name for the day after Christmas, when sometimes even the most thoughtful presents only seem to elicit groans of discontent. There’s a long history in children’s books […]

The Best Present

Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Best-Present.mp3 Author Shelley Fraser Mickle Air Date 12/25/2000 christmas gifts on white background The Best Present Transcript In 1958, I was an awkward fourteen-year old whose cat had just been run over. I’d found that cat when I was eight years old, and it had been the cat of my […]

Purloined Christmas

Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/The-Purloined-Christmas.mp3 Author Rita Smith Air Date 12/18/2000 Purloined Christmas Transcript Here’s Rita Smith with a story about something that went missing one Christmas. Casting about for an interesting children’s Christmas story, I found one in the December 1897 issue of St. Nicholas Magazine for Children that gives new meaning to […]

Holiday Sites

Koren Stembridge guides us on a virtual tour of the holidays.

St. Nicholas Day

Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/St.-Nicholas-Day.mp3 Author Rita Smith Air Date 12/6/2000 St. Nicholas Day Transcript In her lost and found essay today, Rita Smith takes us from the fourth century to the present’s presents. December 6 is St. Nicholas Day, according to legend, the date a man named Nicholas, who lived in the fourth […]