Holidays on Ice
David Sedaris's 1997 collection gathers six short pieces around the season most writers leave alone. The anchor is SantaLand Diaries, his account of working as Crumpet the elf in Macy's Christmas village, a job that gave him a perch on cranky parents, exhausted Santas, and the strange theater of department-store holidays. The other pieces range from a savage Christmas letter to a small-town theater critic reviewing children's nativity plays. Sedaris writes from inside the holiday rather than above it, and the humor is sharpened by genuine fondness for the people he is skewering. The book helped turn him from a public-radio fixture into one of the most read American humorists of his generation.
What you might want to know about Holidays on Ice
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A short, savage collection of holiday essays and stories, anchored by Sedaris's months as a Macy's Christmas elf.
Barrymore included it on her One Grand Books top ten, a list she described as the books she would want with her if she could only keep a small shelf.
The pieces are all seasonal, but Sedaris uses the holidays as a frame for essays about work, family, and small-town theater rather than offering a holiday how-to.
Holidays on Ice was written by David Sedaris, published in 1997 by Little, Brown and Company.
Holidays on Ice is 166 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Holidays on Ice takes most readers 2 to 4 hours to finish.
Holidays on Ice is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
