How do you create Christmas spirit when the temperature refuses to dip below fifty degrees or when snow is a miracle that vanishes at sunrise?

Held together by bonds of family, soil, and history, Mississippians share a peculiar yuletide experience in the Deep South. To capture the state's unique holiday glow, Christmas Stories from Mississippi packages writings by such greats as Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Elizabeth Spencer, Clifton Taulbert, Barry Hannah, William Faulkner, and Ellen Gilchrist with the work of such rising stars as Edward Cohen, Carolyn Haines, and...

This beautiful book of thirty-eight essays, illustrated by Mississippi's premier watercolorist Wyatt Waters, will ring true with treasured recollections of Christmases past. Remember the Christmas it snowed on the Mississippi Coast? Glen Allison recalls that miracle. Richard Ford and Waters tell exactly what they felt when they first laid eyes on a bicycle left under the tree by Santa Claus. These Mississippians celebrate Christmas pageants, the decorating, the family dinners--even as they recognize war and loss as part of our lives and sometimes part of our holidays. Christmas Memories...

Born in Coolidge, Texas, Samuel Marshall Gore was the sixth of ten children born to a Baptist preacher and a mother described as -an angel.- From early childhood, Samuel Gore remembers enjoying making things, and gives credit to his mother and grandmother for his interest in art. Gore went on to be an art teacher and professor for more than fifty years, mostly at Mississippi College in Clinton, Mississippi. He has shown work in exhibitions and galleries for more than forty years. In 2012 the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.