San Antonio College Library

"The Day of the Dead, an ancient cultural tradition, still flourishes in modern-day Mexico. This beautiful documentary presents the annual commemoration of the Day of the Dead as it is celebrated on the island of La Picanda. On this day when the dead are believed to revisit the temporal realm, the program allows viewers a glimpse into Mexican life as they follow the preparations--including bountiful food offerings and wax statues--and observance of...

For those seeking to learn more about Jewish celebrations. Intended for the reader who has no prior knowledge about the Jewish holidays as well as the reader who knows the basics about the holidays but wants to understand them on a deeper level, Axelrod's book takes a humorous, light-hearted look at the eleven most important Jewish holidays. Instead of simply explaining that Jews are obligated to observe in a certain way because of a biblical text,...

Religious Celebrations is an alphabetically organized encyclopedia that covers more than 800 celebratory occasions from all of the world's major religious communities as well as many of the minor faith traditions. The encyclopedia provides a complete reference tool for examining the myriad ways people worldwide celebrate their religious lives across religious boundaries, providing information on numerous celebratory activities never before covered...

Publisher's description: With a riotous mix of saints and devils, street theater and dancing, and music and fireworks, Christian festivals are some of the most lively and colorful spectacles that occur in Spain and its former European and American possessions. That these folk celebrations, with roots reaching back to medieval times, remain vibrant in the high-tech culture of the twenty-first century strongly suggests that they also provide an indispensable...

"Cultural historian Ehrenreich explores a human impulse that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. She uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although 16th-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West,...

Presents a calendar with entries for each anniversary and holiday celebrated on any day, and citing at least one source of information for each entry from the bibliography at the back of the book.

Profiles the lives of many distinguished citizens of the U.S., explores the richness of its religious traditions, describes its holidays, customs, and festivities, and reports its ways of marking anniversaries.