Classic Christmas ballet

Dear Aunt Debbie,

What an excellent post from Bob!  I've never read any Rosemary Sutcliff, but it's clear that I should.  She'll go on my maternity leave reading list, for sure.

This weekend has offered the first breather for me in quite a while, after a punishing week of teaching and grading and kids' school holiday parties.  Thanks to my most excellent in-laws, yesterday I had a chance to finish my Christmas shopping, including a visit to Book Court, our favorite local independent, to pick up a few last books I'd ordered.  Seeing the crowded, cheerful store, I thought happily of the business you've been doing.

In the children's section, there were several Christmas-themed picture books facing out, including one I've been wanting to write about for a few weeks: The Nutcracker, by Susan Jeffers.  We discovered this book a couple of years ago, completely unconnected to the Christmas season: Eleanor picked it up at the library, and then wanted to read it every night for three weeks.  My general rule on library books is that if they occasion two or three requests to renew them or take them out again, we'll go ahead and buy them, so about a year ago I bought Eleanor this copy.

It's a clearly-told, sumptuously illustrated version of the story which hews closely to the plot of the ballet, and contains lots of good dancing pictures.  One of the charming and odd things about it is the number of pages where, if you look closely, no one's feet are touching the ground: everybody seems to be floating.

(Apologies for the slightly cut-off text -- the pages are oversized, and my scanner is not.)

The Mouse King is a little creepy, but not too terribly frightening, and there are pages of dancers in various costumes, allowing both Eleanor and Isabel to announce on reaching each page which of the dancers they'd like to be.  (Eleanor is partial to the Sugar Plum Fairy, natch.)  We went to see a version of the Nutcracker ballet this year, and Eleanor was slightly confused that the name of the heroine was Clara -- in Jeffers's book,  as apparently in Alexandre Dumas's retelling of the original and creepier E.T.A. Hoffman story, the girl is called Marie.  Marie or Clara, she points her toes and flies through the air here in a totally winning, slightly cheesy manner which both of my girls adore.

It's a good book for Christmas, or for ballet-loving kids, or for anyone in the mood for a slightly loopy fairy-tale story that ends well.

Love, Annie

Guest blog: The poetic language of Lorenz Graham

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Our guest blogger tonight is none other than my mom, your sister, Judy.  This is a true family affair!  Here she is, on a book I remember with great fondness from my childhood.

Dear Debbie,

One of my very favorite children’s books is Every Man Heart Lay Down by Lorenz Graham, with lovely illustrations by Colleen Browning.  It’s a retelling of the birth of Jesus in, as Graham says, “the idiom of the West African native.”

Lorenz Graham was born in New Orleans, the son of a Methodist minister.  As a young man, he worked as a teacher in a mission school in Liberia for five years and was amazed at the power and beauty of the English dialects he found there, and at the way the Bible stories had been made new again by being retold and reimagined.   He absorbed the music and rhythm of the speech that enveloped him, and these story poems are the result.

Our dear friend Sally, who had a knack for spotting marvelous language, gave us “Every Man Heart Lay Down” when Annie was little.  It is the kind of book that cries out to be read aloud, and challenges you to do it without choking up: 

Long time past

Before you papa live

Before him papa live

Before him pa’s papa live—

Long time past

Before them big tree live

Before them big tree’s papa live —

That time God live.

And God look on the world

What He done make

And Him heart no lay down.

The plot is the prequel to the story of the birth of Jesus you may be familiar with.  In this book (spoiler alert), God is about to destroy the world, he is so angry about the way things are going, when a small boy begs him,

“Don’t break the world

What You done make.

Don’t lose the people

What You done care for.

I beg you

Make it I go

I talk to people

I walk with people

Bye-m-bye they savvy the way.”

And the pican go down softly softly

And hold God’s foot.

So God look on Him small boy

And Him heart be soft again

Once you start quoting this book, it is practically impossible to stop, the writing is so lovely. 

Graham is also the author of other Bible stories told in the same vein. 
How God Fix Jonah is the name of his collection, originally published in 1946, which came out in a new edition in 2000, illustrated by Ashley Bryan.  It includes “Every Man Heart Lay Down,” as well as “David He No Fear,” which also was published alone in an edition with pictures by Ann Grifalconi.

Just one more quote.  I can’t resist.  Here is the passage where David walks up to Goliath:

The giant say

“Ho! Small boy done come to say how-do.”

David say

“I come for fight!”

Giant say

“Do you mommy know you out?”

David say

“Now I kill you!”

Giant say

“Go from my face less I eat you!”

Graham is also the author of “Tales of Momolu,” stories about the life of an African boy, as well as the Town book series of contemporary African American life.   I am not familiar with these books yet.   Do you know them, Deb?

Love,

Judy

And love from me too,

Annie

Merry Christmas!

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Christmas at my in-laws' house in Illinois!  The children are nestled all snug in their beds, my wrapping is done, there's a light layer of snow outside and plates of Christmas cookies jostling for space with the pies on the kitchen counter -- it's a lovely night.

Tonight, along with The Night Before Christmas, we read another favorite Christmas story (one we actually read all year round), and I found myself wishing for the other Christmas Eve book of my childhood, which I'm going to have to find for the girls next year.  To be honest, I should admit that Eleanor and I read these books; Isabel sat on Jeff's lap and directed him emphatically to read her
My Teeth and Olivia's Opposites. So she doesn't quite get Christmas yet.  It'll come.


Morris's Disappearing Bag was a gift from you to me in 1979 -- it's inscribed "To Annie -- With love from your disappearing aunt.  Love, Debbie."  It'll be out of print by now, I thought to myself, but it isn't -- a new edition came out in 2001.  I think this may be, like Noisy Nora, a book that Rosemary Wells did new, more brightly colored illustrations for in order to get it reprinted.  The cover image here is a little different from the one we have, but I'm sure it's essentially the same.

Morris is the youngest bunny in a family of four.  On Christmas morning, his brother Victor gets a hockey set, his sister Rose gets a beauty kit, and just as you're thinking oh no, a gender-role-reinforcing little Christmas book, Morris's other sister, Betty, gets a chemistry set.  Morris gets a bear.  The other siblings play with their own presents and with each others' ("And then Victor made himself beautiful and Betty played goalie and Rose invented a new gas."), but no one will let Morris play with their toys because he's too young, and no one wants his bear.  Morris droops.  But then!  Under the Christmas tree, Morris finds an overlooked package.  Inside is a Disappearing Bag -- he crawls in and becomes invisible.  A couple of funny pages follow where Morris's siblings can't find him, but the tips of his ears or tail are showing, so your kid can.  Morris pops out of the bag, lets his silings jump into it, and plays with all of their toys on his own until bedtime.

There is something very satisfying about this little book -- it's so good about jealousy and sharing and siblings, and Rosemary Wells can't be beat for drawing droopy bunnies.  It's a Christmas story, but I've never thought of it as relegated to Christmas-time reading.  I'm glad it's still around.

As in your house, I grew up with the King James version of Jesus's birth as one of the traditional Christmas Eve readings.  We always referred to it as "the part in the Bible where Jesus gets born."  In our house, the book was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the Bible passages illustrated with reproductions of Old Masters' paintings.  In the absence of the book at the moment, I'm trying to figure out which it must have been.  This is my best guess.

There's a current version out, however, which I plan to get in the next year: The Christmas Story (Metropolitan Museum of Art).  There's something appropriate about having the story illustrated by multiple artists, from multiple years and countries -- no one person has a lock on what the Holy Family looked like, and there are such great and differing depictions of the animals as well.

And now I'm off to bed, so Santa can come.  Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Love, Annie

Counting down to Christmas

Dear Aunt Debbie,

And happy holidays to you!  Having an almost-4 year old in the house makes Christmas seem right around the corner.  Every morning, Eleanor opens the next window on her advent calendar, and she must count from 1 to 24 at least six times a day.  She's even started to remember the number 15, which usually gets skipped.

Holiday anticipation is, of course, reflected in our reading list, in new favorites and old.

New: an abridged version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, illustrated by Brett Helquist.  The abridging is okay -- boils the story down to its most important elements, so you get Tiny Tim saying "God bless us, every one!" but not any more of a real sense of him or the Cratchit family, and there's no explanation for why Scrooge was left alone at Christmas when he was a boy, or why the lovely young woman he danced with at Fezziwig's party didn't end up as his wife.  The original A Christmas Carol, which my family often read as Christmas approached, is coming soon in our future, I think.

The gift of this book are the illustrations, which are vivid and appealing, and bring the ghost story to life for kids.  They owe a lot to the 1951 British film, which I remember watching often as a kid -- the beautiful Spirit of Christmas Past; the jolly, bearded Spirit of Christmas Present; and the death-cloaked specter of the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come.  (In a nice anachronistic touch in Helquist's illustrations, the third spirit seems to be trailing a string of electric lights, which I guess you might get wrapped around you if you kept traveling to Christmases of the future.)  Jacob Marley's ghost is enormous and imposing, and Scrooge sallow and beak-nosed.  Eleanor listens to it each time with wide, excited eyes and her hands drawn up to her mouth, thrilled.

Old: There must be hundreds of versions of The Night Before Christmas.  I imagine it is a huge best-seller: simple and rhyming and focused on Santa.  The girls have a lush version of it from Jeff's parents, complete with a tiny golden stocking hanging from the silky red string bookmark.  From my parents, we've inherited my childhood version, above which there can be no others in my eyes.

It's out of print, of course, but you can find copies at Alibris and elsewhere: the Leonard Weisgard-illustrated version of The Night Before Christmas.

It is a perfect book.  I've had to reinforce the binding of our copy with clear tape in order to keep it together, but the illustrations are intact and it's undamaged.  All, that is, except for the page describing the children's dreams.  Over and around their heads, I once took a purple marker, I guess to approximate sugar-plums.  I didn't write in my books as a rule, so I must have felt strongly about scribbling on this page.

What is so perfect about the illustrations?  It's hard to explain.  They are sweet without being cutesy: the narrator appears bluff and hearty, and Santa pleasant and bright-eyed.  The pages are oversized (too big for my scanner to capture accurately), and Weisgard alternates simple scenes with images of Santa imposed over pine tree branches or surrounded by a wreath.

Perhaps I'm blinded to other Santas because this was my first, but I can't help feeling that there can't be a better one.  Do you have a current favorite?

Love, Annie