It is Angel Gabriel who tells Mary that she is going to have a child - the son of God. An angel comforts Joseph, letting him know Mary's pregnancy was divinely determined. An angel points the way for shepherds to find the manger where the baby lies, as a choir of angels rejoices in his birth. An angel warns Mary and Joseph to flee into Egypt to escape Herod's wrath.

It is not surprising, then, that angels have been regular features of Christmas festivities for centuries. They sit atop the tree or adorn its branches. They hang from rafters or spread their wings on a shelf of whatnots. They call out from Christmas cards. Tots dressed in white bedsheets and crowned with glitter garlands are mainstays of the Christmas pageant.

And not so long ago, an angel craze was sweeping the nation all year, not just during the holiday season.

Throughout the 1990s, "Touched by an Angel" was one of the top-rated shows on television, Where Angels Walk: True Stories of Heavenly Visitors was a New York Times best-seller and stores selling nothing but angels popped up all over the country - including Guardian Angels in Trolley Square. A bimonthly magazine, Angel Times, attracted thousands.

Like so many fads, though, the angel obsession seems to have dissipated.

"Touched" ended in 2003, Angel Times ceased publication and Guardian Angels morphed into Spellbound, a Sugar House store that specializes in paganism, earth-based religions and Wicca. Not an angel in sight.

The book industry moved on to Celtic spirituality, then to the apocalyptic Left Behind series and The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Narnia.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may have contributed to the decline.

"We're seeing far fewer books on angels than we did even when I started this job in '99, and by then the trend was largely over," says Jana Reiss, religion book editor for Publishers Weekly.

Today the trend is toward tradition, she says. Readers seem eager to borrow elements from old religious traditions, even ones that are not their own (hence the popularity of Kabbalah among non-Jews, fasting among Evangelicals and the Virgin Mary among Protestants).

"Whereas the angel craze was driven by personal, individual spirituality - Americans loved the idea that there was an angel looking out for each unique person, since we are such an individualized culture - the current trends are more about tradition and community," Reiss says. "In a post-9/11 world, we're less interested in a generic, warm-fuzzy spirituality than we are in concrete, specific practices that have worked for generations of people of faith."

That parallels Mormon entrepreneur Nita Kemsley's experience.

In September 1993, she was taking a nap when she had "a foggy dream in which I heard a voice specifically saying you need to do this and you need to do this now," she said at the time. By taking out a second mortgage on her home, she was able to put together quickly a store where "Angel Chants" were playing on the video recorder, dalmatians with wings stared down from a wall poster, and the Angel's Daily Planner offered "plans, promises and prayers for each new day." The biggest seller was a Guardian Angel pin.

In the first nine months, the store grossed more $100,000 in sales.

There was a growing awareness that angels were trying "to touch us and let us know there is something more out there," she said at the time.

Little did Kemsley know the angel trend was nearing its peak.

The store was quite successful for a number of years, then struggled until, after Sept. 11, business almost completely dried up. People were careful about spending money, fearful of the future. While angels sales dropped off, items from Celtic spirituality and other ancient cultures picked up. The latter became the crux of her business.

"It's been an interesting journey," Kemsley says. "We've gone from the ethereal angels of heaven to the more earth-based religions. The truth is probably somewhere in-between."

Author Joan Wester Anderson agrees that the fad may be over - her publisher, Random House, declined to publish her most recent work, telling her it was "angeled-out" - but public interest in angels is far from over.

It began, she says, in the 1970s when evangelist Billy Graham wanted a book on angels for a sermon but couldn't find one. So he wrote it.

"He said that angels were 'lights in the darkness,' '' Anderson says.

The book, Angels: God's Secret Agents, became an overnight success when published in 1975, selling more than a million copies at a time when The New York Times was not tracking Christian books. Graham's exploration on angels is still in print and became the launching pad for the 1990s resurgence.

That was "a two-layer phenomenon," Anderson says in a phone interview from her home in northern Chicago.

The first level attracted people who wanted to be part of anything popular. It may have filled their needs at the time and prompted a little spirituality, if only by wearing an angel pin.

But, she says, underneath it all something profound was happening. People were awakening to the notion that angels exist, that they are connected to this world and that they help us.

As recently as 2004, in a Gallup survey, more Americans than ever said they believed in angels - nearly 80 percent compared with 68 percent in the 1980s.

Anderson gets more than 50 e-mails a day describing encounters with angels. The Catholic former journalist is on a constant speaking tour and has published several more books on encounters with heavenly messengers since Walking With Angels. Her most recent book, In the Arms of the Angels, has several stories from Sept. 11.

"With the increasing traumatic things, people's faith in their own ability to be in charge has been shaken," Anderson says. "But the angels didn't go anywhere. They're right here, being a light in the darkness."

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Contact Peggy Fletcher Stack at pstack@sltrib.com or 801-257-8725. Send comments to religioneditor@ sltrib.com.