Tag Archives: Christmas

Webinar: Interpreting Winter Holidays with Your Community

The winter holidays are some of the most beloved and heavily attended times of year for museums and historic sites—but interpreting them can be a challenge. Whose stories are told? What traditions are represented? How can we ensure our programs are welcoming, accurate, and relevant to our communities?

If you’ve been asking these questions, join me at an upcoming webinar hosted by the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH):

  • “Interpreting Winter Holidays with Your Community”
  • Wednesday, June 12, 2025, 3:00–4:00 PM Eastern
  • $45 / $25 for AASLH members
  • Register here

I’ll be speaking alongside Ken Turino, Martha Katz-Hyman, and Morgan Lloyd, each of whom brings experience and insights into crafting more inclusive, community-centered holiday programs. We’ll explore ways that museums and historic sites can move beyond nostalgic or monolithic narratives and instead embrace a richer variety of traditions and histories—from Hanukkah to Kwanzaa, from secular seasonal festivals to the complexities of Christmas. Whether you’re revamping long-standing programs or launching something new, this session will offer fresh ideas, examples, and practical steps for engaging your community during the holiday season.

In my portion of the webinar, I’ll share strategies for refreshing an existing Christmas event by incorporating research on state and local history, helping organizations better connect with their communities and interpret traditions in a meaningful context.

The webinar is inspired in part by the recent book Interpreting Christmas at Museums and Historic Sites, which Ken and I co-edited and which features contributions from many practitioners grappling with these same questions. As a bonus, webinar attendees will receive a 30% discount on the book.

Webinar: Interpreting Winter Holidays on June 12

I know, we’re barely out of winter and we’re talking about winter holidays?? If you work at a museum or historic site, I know you’re already planning and we’re here to help!

Building upon the AASLH publication Interpreting Christmas at Museums and Historic Sites and our 2024 webinar on Maximizing Your Museum’s Holiday Potential, this webinar will explore how historic houses and history museums can transform the holiday season into a powerful opportunity for community engagement, inclusivity, and innovation. Focusing on Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, this presentation will offer case studies of successful programming and exhibits from across the country and brainstorming on how participants can scale and adapt these ideas to fit their local contexts and community needs.

Presenters include:

DATE: June 12, 2025

TIME: 3:00 – 4:15 pm EASTERN (Remember to adjust for your time zone)

COST: $25 AASLH members/$45 nonmembers

To register or for more details, visit the AASLH Resource Center.

Join Today’s Museum People Call on Interpreting Christmas at Museums!

Are you ready to explore how the holiday season can transform your museum? Today at 12 pm Central Time (1 pm Eastern), the Illinois Association of Museums is hosting its monthly “Museum People Call”, and this month’s topic is Christmas at Museums and Historic Sites!

I’ll be joined by Ken Turino, my co-editor of the new AASLH book series Interpreting Christmas at Museums and Historic Sites, to discuss how your organization can leverage the holiday season to its fullest potential.

We’ll cover key topics to help you:

  • Leverage the holiday season to attract visitors and engage your community.
  • Increase financial stability through creative programming, gift shop sales, and end-of-year giving campaigns.
  • Enhance cultural sensitivity and inclusivity, ensuring your holiday interpretation is meaningful and welcoming to diverse audiences.

Whether your site has a long history of holiday programming or you’re just starting to explore the possibilities, this session will offer practical tips and inspiring ideas to align holiday traditions with your mission.

🎄 Join Us on Zoom 🎄
Click here to join the meeting
Meeting ID: 861 3328 4346

Let’s come together to make the holiday season brighter, more inclusive, and impactful for your museum and its visitors. We look forward to seeing you there!

PS. On Wednesday, December 25, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era podcast will release an interview about the Interpreting Christmas book with me, Ken, and Lenora Henson, formerly director of the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Historic Site in Buffalo, New York.

Christmas in July: Maximize Your Museum’s Holiday Potential

In an earlier post, I shared a sneak peek of our book, Interpreting Christmas at Museums and Historic Sites. Next week, Ken and I will provide a comprehensive overview during the upcoming AASLH webinar, “Jingle All the Way: Maximizing Your Museum’s Holiday Potential.” This webinar draws from the book but is not an hour-long sales pitch. Instead, we’ll share key advice and ideas on leveraging holiday celebrations, researching the local history of Christmas, planning and hosting holiday events, expanding traditional programs, and enhancing cultural sensitivity and inclusivity. With so much to cover, we’ll be hitting the highlights. If you’re seeking inspiration for Christmas during these hot summer days, join us on July 23, 2024 at 3:00 pm Eastern. For more details and to register, visit here. Plus, you’ll receive a 30% discount code for the book upon registration.

With proofs in hand, the book is moving closer to reality with a publishing date in fall, but more likely later than earlier. It has 21 chapters, 40 images, and an extensive bibliography of nearly 175 books and articles packed into 270 pages, which is about 25% longer than my Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites that Rowman & Littlefield published ten years ago (btw, Rowman was recently acquired by Bloomsbury Publishing). It’s now available for pre-order at Rowman.com for $50 for paperback and a jaw-dropping $125 for hardcover (I don’t set the prices but a 30% discount code is available for webinar attendees).

Behind the Scenes of Indexing

Ken Turino, Sara Bhatia, and I spent nearly two months creating he index, despite the publisher allocating just two weeks. The delay was partly due to other commitments (I was closing out the semester and attending the Newport Summer School), but also because the scope of the book made it significantly more complex. As anticipated, there’s an abundance of content on gifts, trees, lights, ornaments, decorating, and a variety of Santas. Rather than list two dozen pages that mention “lights,” we added subheadings for candles and electric lights, as well as safety considerations, and included “see also” references to help readers find specific information more quickly. But geez, that was slow going.

My chapter, “I’m Dreaming of a Warm Christmas: Researching California (and Other Local Places)” was initially indexed by GPT-3.5, then corrected manually as seen in this example. GPT-4o is more accurate when trained for indexing, but every entry still needs to be confirmed.

We experimented with GPT to produce the index, and the results were mixed. While GPT can generate an initial index with proper nouns and some concepts correctly formatted with page numbers, about half of the entries are usually either missing or incorrect (see example above). Thus, manual review of the proofs is still necessary, but at least GPT provides a head start. If you are interested in learning more in using GPT for indexing, I’m happy to share what I learned.

The index eventually grew to 22 pages, which is longer than most chapters! Indexing required a meticulous review of every page, during which we discovered errors that had slipped past four proofreaders. Ugh. Should we consider these flaws a characteristic of an artisanal, handcrafted gift to the field?

A Sneak Peek at “Interpreting Christmas”

Ken Turino, Sara Bhatia, and I are currently compiling the index for our book Interpreting Christmas at Museums and Historic Sites, while the other authors are meticulously reviewing the proofs for any final corrections. But we are much more excited to announce that we have a colorful cover featuring images from Old World Wisconsin and Strawbery Banke, and that Rowman and Littlefield have made the 270-page book available for pre-orders at this link.

To get a start on the holidays, join us in July when we’ll be hosting a live AASLH webinar, “Jingle All the Way: Maximizing Your Museum’s Holiday Potential.” Drawing from some of the insights in the book, we’ll discuss how your historic house or history museum can leverage December’s holiday season to enhance community engagement.  Mark your calendar for July 23 at 3 p.m. Eastern and secure your spot by registering here for $45 ($25 for AASLH members).

For a preliminary glimpse inside Interpreting Christmas, I’m sharing the proofs for the table of contents and introduction. Just remember, they’re publisher’s proofs so they are subject to change!

Interpreting Christmas pages i-xivDownload

Interpreting Christmas at Museums: A New Guide Nears Completion

Ken Turino and I started on Interpreting Christmas at Museums and Historic Sites three years ago and I’m delighted that it is now in production at Rowman and Littlefield. Our goal is to have the book available for the AASLH annual conference in September 2024, but that’s a very tight deadline, so no promises. 

It will be among the latest titles in the Interpreting series of the American Association for State and Local History, which started ten years ago and included my book, Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites. There are now nearly two dozen Interpreting books available to the field on a wide range of topics, filling a huge gap in the literature.

As part of the publication process, two colleagues reviewed the manuscript anonymously (thank you, whoever you are!) and provided lots of helpful suggestions along with the overall evaluation that, “With a superstar group of contributors, the editors have assembled a handy and engaging collection that offers abundant practical advice and interpretive guidance for public historians who are developing and running holiday programs. Museum educators, curators, interpreters, and managers will be thrilled to have such a helpful collection as a reference and guide.”

With the hope for publication in fall 2024, Ken is proposing a session for the NEMA annual meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, and for an AASLH webinar. If the book is out in time for the AASLH annual conference in September, the publisher will host a book signing. We also have a standing invitation for an interview on the NPS blog.  If you have other suggestions for regional conferences or other presentations, please let Ken or me know. We are happy to consider any potential sessions or presentations about the book as a whole or a focused topic around research, diverse traditions, planning, and public programming.