NPR Holiday Favorites

“Here’s a collection that truly is a seasonal delight, with National Public Radio holiday moments from Thanksgiving to the New Year, with stops at Christmas, Kwanzaa and Hanukkah in between. What a holiday gift from NPR.” -- The Providence Journal

• David Sedaris contributes his now classic “Santaland Diaries,” his account of his experiences playing Santa’s little helper at Macy’s in New York.
• Susan Stamberg sneaks her mother-in-law’s recipe for cranberry relish onto the air—again.
• Storyteller Kevin Kling finds an invitation to participate in a production of The Nutcracker too tempting to resist.
• Ghanian-born commentator Meri Danquah shares her thoughts on Kwanzaa.
• Cowboy poet Baxter Black describes a Christmas cookie with “the denseness of an anvil and the half-life of a radial tire.”
• Robert Siegel goes in search of the correct spelling for December’s Jewish holiday.
• Historian Douglas Brinkley recounts the Christmas Truce of 1914.
• The Thanksgiving tables are turned on unsuspecting Bostonians in “When Turkeys Attack.”
• Brian Unger thinks turkey day speeches are not only scary but unnecessary in "How to Get Out of Giving Thanks.”
• Steven Ivory toasts the kindness of strangers in “My Annual New Year’s Quandary.”
• Author Jeanne Martinet offers insights in "Mingle All the Way Through Holiday Parties."
• Theoretical physicist Brian Greene reveals how to make the Thanksgiving holiday last just a little bit longer.
• Comedian and writer Amy Sedaris plays a game called "Drinking this much will win me a Pulitzer Prize, or make not winning a lot easier to take."
• A potentially depressing Thanksgiving day is saved by an encounter with a friendly NY city cab driver.
• In 1944 a mother in Staten Island, NY, decides to forgo a Christmas tree because her son Joey is missing in action.
• It's a tradition in the Berkes family to repay a Christmas favor.
• Legendary songstress Patti LaBelle celebrates the holidays.
• NPR's Scott Simon offers some thoughts on Santa Claus.
• Novelist Paul Auster reads the story "Christmas Morning, 1949."
• NPR's Robert Smith dons his own Santa suit for this undercover report on Santarchy! - a disturbing new Christmas tradition.
• Music producer Mike Andrews and musicians Carrie Brownstein and Jill Sobule recount "The Worst Gifts Ever."
• Don Novello, aka Father Guido Sarducci, reveals his dislike for Christmas songs with his own offereing to the genre, One Hundred Bulbs (on the Christmas Tree).
• Ron Gompertz discusses his version of the holidays in "Mixed Families Set to Celebrate 'Chrismukkah.'
• Roya Hakakian remembers a stranger's Christmas kindness in  "A Personal Miracle on 55th Street".
• Storyteller Jay O'Callahan remembers a winter in his life when hope was found in the person of a little boy.
• Christmas just isn't Christmas without "Feliz Navida" by Jose Feliciano.
• Writer and homemaker Melinda Shoaf is the one who sees to it that a holiday actually happens in the lives of her loved ones.
• Reporter Tamara Keith couldn't figure out how to make Latkes, even with the help of her mother-in-law's recipe.