It’s 4:30 am, and I can’t sleep! But I’m having fun passing the time thinking about Christmas books. When I was a kid, my mom had a rule that we couldn’t leave our rooms Christmas morning until she came to get us. Not a great rule, but it meant going to bed with a big stack of picture books. My favorite was “The Very Best Christmas Gift” by Jim Razzi. It’s about a lonely misanthrope who repeatedly rejects his cat’s affection and sends it away many times until he finally realizes he needs love in his life and the cat forgives him. Are the illustrations amazing? They’re adequate. Does it model a “healthy relationship”? Heck no. But as a kid in a family with some relationship issues of its own, something in it spoke to me.
Current favorites:
“A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas, a memoir that captures so much of the tumbling feeling of fun and beauty of a snowy Christmas day with a big, boisterous family that has a cellar of country wine at its disposal. It is, of course, full of poetry. The text version is easy to find online, and there are a couple versions of Thomas reading it on Youtube, too. He has a voice and a half.
The last section of Shirley Jackson’s “Raising Demons” is a meditation on Christmas with her family. It captures so well the rush and excitement of getting ready, of the little social obligations and idiosyncratic household rituals. Being Shirley Jackson, she perfectly evokes both enormous affection for her children and the bittersweet feeling of the moment of contentment you’ve worked and yearned for passing in front of your eyes. Jackson is getting a lot of love on this sub right now, as she should!
What Christmassy lit has a place in your heart?
OK, now I’m going to go read a book until it’s light out. In three hours.
(Edited right after posting: Tried to make my Jackson paragraph better!)
by plantpotdapperling