Whatever our cultural roots, celebrating festivals together can breathe life into family, school and community. Following the success of Festivals Family and Food, All Year Round and Festivals Together, Hawthorn Press is now developing a series of books for parents and educators that focus on celebrating festivals from all over the world.

Beautifully produced - for we believe that the distinctive aesthetic character of our books makes them a pleasure to own and use - each volume gathers together a wide range of seasonal stories, religious traditions, games, songs, recipes, illustrations, poems and crafts. This series is inspired by the vision that celebrating the seasonal and festive round can enable us to touch into a deeper sense of meaning and community.

It is a common concern that our lives have grown more fragmentary and disjointed, that a sense of community is increasingly difficult to sustain. We have also become largely alienated from the rhythms of nature which formerly exerted such a powerful and coherent influence on human life and work, giving an overall sense of meaning and order to things.

At Hawthorn Press we believe that children in particular benefit from the security and real meaning offered by seasonal celebrations and the honouring of life passages and rhythms in their lives, such as celebrating birthdays or coming of age as a young adult. For the young child - whose very element is doing - a hands-on approach to festivals through active involvement in cooking, craft, song and story makes celebration real. For older children, too, the seasons of the year become a strong, sustaining experience when they can take part in - and increasingly form for themselves - shared festivities of all kinds from Halloween to Hanukkah.

But the Festivals Series has a still wider vision. We wish to celebrate in the largest sense both what unites us all, our shared humanity, and also our great diversity: in fact all the particularity and difference that adds up to the spice of life. Given that current conflicts in the world arise partly from a failure of imagination, an inability to understand and empathise with experience different from our own, it is surely not going too far to see that the celebration of festivals from different cultures is a practical way to enlarge the imagination, to develop active understanding of other ways and views of life.

Look at many schools in Britain today, and you will find a wonderful melting pot of cultures, traditions and views of the world: a kind of microcosm, perhaps, of a world to come. And when better to nurture tolerance, respect and sympathy for each other's differences and traditions than at an early age, through shared celebration, before views become entrenched and imagination starts to fade.

Hawthorn Press intends to offer readers a feast - the original meaning of 'festival' - of celebrations drawn from authors' direct experience of their own cultures. Through books such as Festivals Together, and a whole range of projects still in the pipeline, from Islam to Christianity, from African and Caribbean to Jewish tradition, from India to Ireland, this series will span the globe. We hope that this will contribute to building and celebrating a more peaceful and creative world.

Matthew Barton, Festivals Series Editor

Martin Large, Publisher