Dear Annie,

Ah, the Nutcracker!  Ah, Christmas!

Both my daughters are home now.  We trimmed the tree last night (complete with a cookie-cutter-shaped star you made circa 1982).  Then we read one of our many Christmas Eve books so that we can get through the rest of the huge pile tonight.  It was a perfect way to feel that family holiday time had started, while keeping one foot in my retail world.  The book is about matching a toy, a child, and a grown-up, with some lovely scenes in a toy store. 

The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden (pictures by Barbara Cooney) is probably the entire family's favorite.  Here's the beginning:

This is a story about wishing.  It is also about a doll and a little girl.  It begins with the doll.
Her name, of course, was Holly.
It could not have been anything else, for she was dressed for Christmas in a red dress, and red shoes, though her petticoat and socks were green.

Holly is placed in the window (note red-clad doll in center of illustration) and told by the other toys that "We must be sold today," Christmas Eve.  They all long for a home and the touch of children's hands.

( I feel right at home with this picture.  Last night I'd just been through a pretty intense day of last-minute shopping, with another coming up today.)

The story is full of longing: Ivy, an orphan in a city, announces she's going to spend Christmas with her grandmother, even though (as she's scoffingly reminded by Barnabas, another orphan) she is without relatives.  Ivy is sent to another orphanage for the holiday, but gets off her train at a small town.  She wanders through a Christmas Eve market, buying food, tea and a balloon.

We start following a local couple -- the husband is a policeman.  The wife is longing for something -- or someone.  She buys a Christmas tree and candles.  He goes to work, reminding her to have his breakfast ready when he finishes the night shift.  Ivy looks in their window and wants to live there.  First, though, she spends a night alone.  Holly goes unsold, despite the efforts of the store owner and his assistant Peter.  During the night, Ivy spots Holly through the store window, and both know they're destined for each other:

"My Christmas doll!"
"My Christmas girl!"

and they wish very hard.

Eventually the policeman finds Ivy (I'm leaving out a sub-plot here), who says she's staying at her grandmother's house, and leads him to his own home.

  Mr. Jones seemed rather surprised.  "Are you sure?" asked Mr. Jones.
   "Qu-quite sure," said Ivy [shivering from the cold].  "She has m-my breakfast ready."
   "Did you say . . . your breakfast?" asked Mr. Jones.
  "Of course," said Ivy, "L-look in at the w-window.  There," she told him.  "Th-there's my Ch-Christmas t-tree."
   Mr. Jones thought a moment.  Then: "Perhaps it is your Christmas tree," he said.
   "Sh-shall we kn-knock?" asked Ivy.  But, "You needn't knock," said Mr. Jones.  "You can come in."

As the girl and the grown-ups are realizing that they're getting their wishes, Peter takes Holly (part of omitted subplot) from the store and leaves her under the Joneses' tree, where Ivy finds her.  This all leads eventually to Ivy's adoption by the Joneses.  When the orphanage director visits to arrange the adoption, Ivy says, "Please tell Barnabas."

The end of the story recaps everyone's fulfilled wishes, concluding:

I told you it was a story about wishing.

So satisfying.

May wishes come true for you and yours and everyone reading on this Christmas Eve.

Much love,

Deborah
 

Halloween

Dear Annie,

Vocabulary and SATs.  A subject I promise to address next post.  At the moment I'm full of the spirit of the season.  First:

Happy Birthday!  I hope you've been celebrated all day long.

It always seemed special to me to have your birthday so close to Halloween.

Our Halloween tradition at the store involves the entire staff dressing in costume.  As the Book Lady, I always try to be a book character.  I've been Miss Clavell from Madeleine, Amelia Bedelia, the zookeeper's wife from Good Night Gorilla, the Guinness Book of World Records, and Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter.  So, in the constant search for Women of a Certain Age in children's literature, I've decided this year to be the eponymous
Miss Rumphius, world traveler and sower of lupine seeds, striving to make the world more beautiful.  The book is  written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney; it's a lovely lyrical celebration of living an engaged life.  Here's Miss Rumphius distributing lupine seeds:

Fortuitously, I still have the Hobbit cape I made for Lizzie's birthday party 15 years ago -- pictured here.  Tomorrow it will belong to Miss Rumphius -- amazing similarity, don't you think?  That and lots of hair devices for building topknots, and I'll be a dead ringer.  Picture to come next time, if it's not too embarrassing.

Happy birthday and Halloween to you.

Love,

Deborah

Books in bronze and stone

Dear Annie,

Your discussion of books about pretend play made me think of
Roxaboxen, another of those books that I'm surprised we haven't mentioned here.  It's by Alice McLerran, wonderfully illustrated by Barbara Cooney (whom we also haven't mentioned enough).

McLerran writes about a group of children who create a whole city out of rocks, boxes, and various found objects in a vacant lot in Arizona. 

Marion called it Roxaboxen. (She always knew the name of everything.)  There across the road, it looked like any rocky hill -- nothing but sand and rocks, some old wooden boxes, cactus and greasewood and thorny ocotillo -- it was a special place.

 The story pulls you into the magic of creating something from imagination, and  a group of mixed-age kids having fun with each other. It makes children want to get up and build a town.  I knew that the story was based on McLerran's mother's own experience, but it turns out that the vacant lot was a specific place in Yuma, Arizona which has now been turned into a delightful-sounding park.  It has a few benches and some signs and a lot of rocks to play with.  Visitors are encouraged to donate rocks, knowing that they'll be added to the mix of stuff used by kids who play there.

So thinking about parks led me to Grant Park in Portland Oregon, in Ramona Quimby's neighborhood.  We came upon it on our cross-country trip ten years ago, not far from where cousin Kate then lived.  It's a nice comfy city park, with playing fields and trees, and in one corner of it are three statues and some very kid-friendly fountains:

 Ramona Quimby, Ribsy, and Henry Huggins are right there, to be played with and splashed around.  Ramona is wearing her boots and seems to be in the scene where she's a kindergartner stuck in the mud in Ramona the Pest. There's even a map of the neighborhood, marking places where events in the books happened.

Coming upon one's books as a real physical places can be very satisfying. Gives you a new way to think about the book, without eclipsing the images in your mind.

Love,

Deborah

Christmas Eve

Dear Annie,

This is my last post before Christmas, so here's what the four of us will be reading on Christmas Eve:

Starting from the bottom:

The two Night Before Christmas versions blogged earlier this month.

 A facsimile edition of the 1939 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer written for the Montgomery Ward department stores.  This is very far from my favorite Christmas song.  I think of it as the ultimate Washington scenario: odd guy gets bullied until someone in power decides he's useful, at which point bullies tell him he'll go down in history.  But hey, the book showed up in our pile of Christmas tradition many years ago.

The Polar Express. by Chris Van Allsburg What can I say?  It's a wonderful classic with slightly fascist imagery.  We all love it.

Jingle Bugs, by David Carter.  He's done quite a few bug pop-up books.  Some of the lines from this one: "Who's in the chimney, warm and snug?" [pull tab, a Santa with buggy eyes and antennae pops out of a chimney] "Ho, ho, ho!  It's Santa Bug!"  This goes on through "jingle bugs swinging to and fro," "Gift-wrapped bugs for you and me,"  and on and on.  Pop-ups are very well engineered.

The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry.  The wonderful story of hair sold to buy a watch chain for a watch sold to buy combs for the hair.  We read the Lisbeth-Zwerger illustrated edition, still beautifully in print.  I've never understood why they didn't just return the combs and go buy back the watch, but I guess that's a story for another day.

Spot's First Christmas, by Eric Hill.  This is the one that, per Grandma's advice, I would have thrown out -- but I realized it too late, alas. Also, it was given to the girls by a friend whom we love.  It's inane, it doesn't rhyme, it's full of Spot and his mother getting ready for Christmas, mostly with Spot wanting to know what presents he's getting.  Our girls have a weird sentimental attachment to it.  I think they're also amused by how much I dislike it.  There was a little serious discussion about giving it to Isabel for Christmas this year, given her dog obsession.  I was willing to mail it if Lizzie and Mona wanted to buy it, but the decision was finally that they worried that you'd feel the same way about it that I do, and that you'd hold it against them for years.  You have been spared.

The Story of Christmas, words from the Bible, illustrated by Jane Ray.  Part of the Christmas tradition of your mother's and my non-religious family was to read the King James Bible story of Jesus' birth.  Our parents felt, as I did with my kids, that if you're going to get the pagan elements of the celebration, you should know the religious story on which it's based.  The language, needless to say, is beautiful.  And Jane Ray's illustrations in this out-of-print books are gorgeous.  All the characters are very middle eastern Semitic-looking, except for an occasional blond angel.

A Christmas Story, by Mary Chalmers, which I remember owning in miniature edition as a child, tells how a girl named Elizabeth, along with Harry Dog, Hilary Cat, and Alice Rabbit find and and trim a tree.  When they discover there is no star for the top, Elizabeth goes out in the snow to find one.  She encounters one of the best-named characters in children's literature: "the Santa Claus for rabbits and other small animals."  He gives her a star, which she carried home triumphantly.  The last word in the book is, "There!." Ahh.

Babar and Father Christmas is one of the longer ones, but totally enjoyable. Babar sets off to find Father Christmas to ask him to deliver to the Elephants' country.  One of the challenges of the book is pronouncing PRJMNESWE, the town in Bohemia near which Father Christmas lives.  Babar finally finds him, and they work out a deal which results in no additional work for the old guy, but joy and presents for the little elephants.

And last -- and best, in many of our opinions -- is The Story of Holly and Ivy, by Rumer Godden, illustrated by Barbara Cooney.   An orphan wandering alone in a small town, a doll in a toy shop, and a slightly sad middle-aged woman married to a policeman all wish for each other, and get their wishes.  This is such a wonderful book that someday -- maybe next December -- I'll devote a whole entry to it.  It's long, it's magical.  We love it.

It's a huge pile.  It takes a couple of hours to read them all.  In recent years we've pulled out one of the three biggest --Holly and Ivy, Babar, or The Gift of the Magi -- to read on the 22nd or 23rd, so that we still have time to race off to our rooms to wrap gifts before midnight Christmas Eve. 

Happy Christmas to all.

Love,

Deborah