In a hard driving society like the United States, holidays are islands of softness. Holidays are times for creating memories and for celebrating cultural values, emotions, and social ties. All Together Now considers holidays that are celebrated by American families: Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Halloween, and the December holidays of Christmas or Chanukah. This book shows how entire families bond at holidays, in ways that allow both children and adults to be influential within their shared interaction. 

The decorations, songs, special ways of dressing, and rituals carry deep significance that is viscerally felt by even young tots. Ritual has the capacity to condense a plethora of meaning into a unified metaphor such as a Christmas tree, a menorah, or the American flag. These symbols allow children and adults to co-opt the meaning of symbols in flexible and age-relevant ways, all while the symbols are still treasured and shared in common. 

Cindy Dell Clark is an associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. She is the author of In A Younger Voice: Doing Child-Centered Qualitative Research.
 

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"As a folklorist, it has long been my belief that we must look to the younger generations as well as the elder when studying tradition. Thankfully, Cindy Dell  Clark provides us with a careful and important volume of research on American holidays as experienced by children. Clark examines children's holiday anxieties that we adults have forgotten or simply ignore. Her research includes the understudied Memorial Day and Chanukah, and focuses our attention on children who are marginalized by normative national celebrations such as diabetic children at Halloween and Jewish children at Christmas."

“Beautifully written, persistently theoretically insightful and methodologically sound and innovative, All Together Now is a gem. Cindy Dell Clark builds on and expands her earlier work on holidays from an interdisciplinary and intergenerational perspective. This engaging book shines through with scholarship capturing the production of celebratory communal events at the individual, family, community and cultural level. A landmark study!”