A Christmas quiz at an office Christmas party changed the research path for one historian.

Dr. Gerry Bowler was interested in making the quiz both challenging and intriguing, so he started researching the different facts and myths surrounding Christmas.

Dr. Bowler says this lead him down a 30 year path of researching everything Christmas. He spent 10 years researching his first book, The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, and that journey   continued for 20 more years and a number of other books.

He is also the author of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, Santa Claus: A Biography, Christmas in the Crosshairs, The Kindly Curmudgeon, and True Obedience: Tudor Protestants and Resistance to Tyranny, as well as countless newspaper and magazine articles, encyclopedia entries, op-eds and academic papers. He also edited Music from Within: A Biography of Sophie Eckhardt-Gramatté and The World’s Greatest Christmas Stories. His books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, Romanian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Part 1

Part 2