Christmas | DeborahYaffe.com

The Line of Thought

. . . to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

The sounds of Jane Austen Christmas

Emma Woodhouse’s Christmas holiday is not a good one, as readers of Emma will recall: On Christmas Eve, she fends off Mr. Elton’s...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 21, 2023

It’s a tough year for traditional Christmas celebrations. The eight maids are a-milking in masks. The ten lords are a-leaping six feet...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 3, 2020

Tomorrow is Christmas, the day on which a larger-than-life personage employing semi-equine transport suddenly appears in our homes,...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 24, 2018

For those of us with school-age children, Christmas week provides a delightful break from the rhythms of the academic calendar: No rising...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 25, 2017

Despite the New York Times’ efforts to persuade us otherwise, Jane Austen is not a Christmassy writer. It’s true that the word...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 24, 2015

If you are a Janeite with no 2016 Christmas plans – and a whole wad of cash left over from this year’s gift shopping – the New York Times...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 23, 2015

Jane Austen is famously careful about the chronology in her stories – Ellen Moody has mined the text to produce working calendars for all...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 25, 2014