On this Christmas Day, Sandra Brown --- New York Times bestselling author of over seventy novels, including SMASH CUT, RICOCHET, and the newly released RAINWATER --- shares a deeply personal story that eloquently describes the beauty of the human spirit; one that will surely offer even the biggest skeptic something to believe in.


It’s difficult to write anything about Christmas without slipping into cliché. Discovering an unexpected gift beneath the tree. Welcoming carolers at the door. Sipping a toddy while toasting toes in front of the fireplace where stockings are hung. Feasting on holiday food. These are the scenes depicted on greeting cards and camera commercials. All are clichés.

That doesn’t bother me in the least. I would go so far as to shamelessly declare that I’m partial to clichés. I thrive on traditions, and the cornier the better. I want my Christmases redolent with banalities. I like observing the rites year after year. Traditions are what make it Christmas.

But if I were to open my Christmas memory box and peer inside, two would stand out from the rest. One would be the Christmas of my sixth year. Perhaps this is the first Christmas of memory and that’s why it distinguishes itself in my recollections. The other would be a Christmas much more recent. Only one of these Christmases was happy, as the dictionary defines the word. But in the other, I found a unique joy.

These two holidays were celebrated in different locations, with different family members. One was observed through the eyes of a child, while the other was experienced from the perspective of an adult. These Christmases were separated by decades. They actually had nothing in common except the date on the calendar and, for me, the debatable existence of Santa Claus.

I have a large family. I’m the oldest of five sisters. My mother came from a family of five children; my father was the youngest of eight children, so there was never a shortage of aunts, uncles, and cousins with whom to spend holidays.

But Christmas was no ordinary holiday. In our family it was an “event.” It was anticipated throughout the rest of the year. The celebration stretched over the entire month of December. It was the reference point for scheduling anything else in the fourth quarter of the year. Something as mundane as a dental appointment or as significant as a wedding was either “before Christmas” or “after Christmas” or “sometime during Christmas.”

This heightened anticipation originated with my mother. Year-round she maintained a holiday outlook on life which crested at Christmastime. She was a romantic for whom rose-colored glasses were invented. She liked laughter and gaiety, sparkle and glitter, fanfare and festivity. She loved people and sought excuses to host parties and get-togethers. Not surprisingly, she was in her element during the Christmas season. It was her thing.

That distinctive Christmas of my childhood was celebrated at the home of my maternal grandparents in the small town of Fayetteville, Texas. At that time, there were only four grandchildren in the family --- me, my next oldest sister, Melanie, my cousin, Gloria, who is my age, and her younger brother, Steve. We were the fearsome foursome.

Gloria and I, four years older and much more sophisticated than our younger siblings, were annoyed by their very existence. Playing with them was out of the question. We hid from them and threatened acts of violence against their persons should they come seeking us. Our secrets were too delicious, our time together too valuable, to be shared with them.

But on that Christmas Eve we put aside our loathing of Melanie and Steve, not wanting to fall into disfavor with Santa Claus on the one night of the year when it was imperative that one remain in his good graces. We were on our best behavior at the dinner table. Following the meal, we offered to help clear the table. Little angels, we were. Good behavior is never as good as when motivated by greed.

After dinner, it fell to my Uncle George to divert us kids for an hour or so. George was the baby of my mother’s family and had turned sixteen that year. He probably put up an argument against this babysitting duty. On second thought, since he had just obtained his drivers license, he might have welcomed any excuse to get behind the wheel. I don’t remember. I do remember him herding us into his jalopy. Going out with Uncle George promised to be an adventure, and our excitement could barely be contained. Gloria and I were even tolerant of Melanie and Steve tagging along.

Now, a word here about my Uncle George: He is a born liar.

Until I was old enough to tell him to shut up and leave me alone, he tormented me with elaborate tales about a dreadful toad named Froggy Boodle who ate children while they slept. Froggy Boodle had open sores that oozed blood and pus. His tongue was wickedly long and slimy and poisonous. He had large snapping lips from which there was no escape. To this day, I have my Uncle George to thank for a pathological fear of frogs, and he continues to weave what he swears are true ghost stories that cause me to shiver and check beneath my bed before going to sleep.

But never was his talent for prevarication exercised so convincingly than on that December night when he had me, Melanie, Gloria and Steve claiming that we spotted Santa Claus and his sleigh streaking across the south Texas sky.

At that time, Fayetteville was a hamlet with a population of maybe a thousand people. There were no city lights to dilute the brilliance of the stars. It was a cold, clear night. Uncle George had driven us to the outskirts of town, when he suddenly stomped on the brake pedal and, to the accompaniment of squealing tires, shouted, “There he is! By golly, it’s Santa Claus!”

We four craned our necks to look out the car’s rear window which quickly grew foggy with our warm breath. Uncle George got out and gazed heavenward. We scrambled from the back seat after him.

“See! There!”

We eagerly followed the direction of his pointing finger. Each of us in turn shouted, “I see him!” We hopped up and down. We squealed. We clapped our hands.

Uncle George told us to be quiet. “Listen. If you listen, you can hear the sleigh bells.”

We listened; we heard.

“I can see Rudolph’s red nose,” he said. “See it?”

We would have sworn on the heads of our yet-to-be-born children that we saw Rudolph’s glowing nose pointing the way for the other reindeer.

“There he goes,” Uncle George said wistfully as Santa disappeared beneath the far horizon. “Strange, he didn’t stop here in Fayetteville. I guess there are no good little children in this town on Christmas Eve.”

Have I mentioned Uncle George’s mean streak? I’d like to tell you that he outgrew it, but, alas....

However, we need not have worried about Santa’s failure to stop in Fayetteville. When we returned to our grandparents’ house, he had been there! Beneath the Christmas tree that dominated the living room were packages and unwrapped presents. Among them were matching twirling batons for Gloria and me. Steve claimed the train set. Melanie cuddled the lifelike baby doll that had been left for her.

In a hushed and reverential voice, my mother told us that all the grownups had been in the kitchen eating mincemeat pie and playing cards. She said that when she first heard the tinkling of bells, she thought her ears were playing tricks on her. “I thought it was our silverware clinking against Grandma’s china.”

But, no, unmistakably the jingling of bells was coming from the direction of the living room. Breathlessly she continued the story for her rapt audience. “So I tiptoed down the hall and peered around the corner, and barely caught a glimpse of Santa’s red coat tail as he disappeared through the front door!”

She shared Uncle George’s penchant for detailed elaborations.

“We saw him, too, Mommy!” I declared with passionate conviction.

“In his sleigh,” added Steve. “Flying.” With a whooshing sound and a wild gesture of his right arm that nearly knocked a bowl of oranges and unshelled walnuts off the table and onto the floor, he demonstrated the arcing path of Santa’s sleigh across sky.

Gloria shot Uncle George a dirty look, saying, “He must’ve been on his way here when we saw him.”

Melanie remained speechlessly in awe of her new doll. Besides, she was a bit young to appreciate the significance of seeing a fat man in a fur-trimmed red suit who could pilot a flying sleigh pulled by nine reindeer around the world over the course of one night and stop at every house in Christendom along the way to deliver precisely the gift most fervently desired by the boy or girl who lived there.

Later, I lay snuggled under a pile of handmade quilts in a bed shared with Gloria. My mother came in to kiss me good night. She sat down on the edge of the bed, stroked my hair, and asked if I liked all the presents Santa Claus had brought me.

At some point between the Santa sighting and this moment of quiet reflection, I had analyzed the chain of magical events and had deduced that they were too remarkable to be fully believed.

“Mommy, is there really a Santa Claus?” I spoke in a whisper. I didn’t want to awaken Gloria and, most certainly, didn’t want my cousin to learn of my doubt. It felt heretical --- although it would be years later before I knew the word for my wavering belief.

My mother replied, “Of course there’s a Santa Claus.”
"Honest and truthfully? He’s a real person?”

“He’s as real as you make him.” She touched my narrow chest. “He lives in here, in your heart.”

“Like God?” I asked.

When I had children of my own, I came to appreciate how difficult it could be to answer their questions. But my mother addressed my perplexity with calmness and insight. “No, he’s not God. God is real. But Santa Claus sort of shows us the kind of person God would like us to be. He’s jolly and kind and generous. He’s always smiling. He loves every little boy and girl everywhere. He brings happiness to people. That’s why I choose to believe in Santa.”

I was too young to grasp the nuances and subtext of her explanation. It only served to validate my skepticism which expanded into resolve: There was no Santa Claus.


May 10th of 1997 marked two momentous events in my life --- my son graduated from university and my mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. For four years I had looked forward to my son’s completion of his studies and his official induction into adulthood. Conversely, I could never have prepared myself for the shocking news of my mother’s affliction, and I received it with the fearful weeping of a child.

Between May and December of that year, she underwent two surgeries in an attempt to prolong her life. Saving it was impossible. The doctors told us that at the outset. But with her characteristic courage and enthusiasm for life, she elected to buy as many days as possible.

That September, because her system was so weakened by chemotherapy and radiation treatments, she contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized for three weeks. When she was at her lowest point, she told me that if she lived until Christmas, she wanted to do something special for other cancer patients.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’m thinking about it.”

By November, the tumor had severely limited her ability to speak. She could utter only one or two words at a time, and often the word she spoke wasn’t the word she sought. This was a woman who had gone to China to teach English to Chinese students, who had traveled to Mexico and sung an entire concert in Spanish, but she no longer had command of her native language. Unable to walk, she was confined to a wheelchair. But by mid-November she had made her plans for Christmas.

With the help of her nurse, her grandchildren, my sisters and me, and anyone else she could enlist to help, she assembled dozens of gift bags stuffed with Christmas candies, ornaments, novelties, and other goodies. The bags were tied with bright bows and stored where they wouldn’t be damaged. The project occupied her for a month.

On a sunny day one week before Christmas, I dressed her in the dress of her choice and carefully applied her makeup. On her hairless head she wore a bright red Santa Claus hat. The white fur pom-pom bobbed against her shoulder. For this occasion, she was willing to look a little goofy.

I never remember her looking more beautiful.

When she was ready, off we went to the cancer center, where for months she had been receiving treatments. A Christmas tree stood in the center of the lobby. Tinsel and colored lights had been strung around the doorways. Christmas music was piped through the sound system. The staff had made an admirable attempt to create a holiday mood, but the gaiety was as false as the faux snow that had been sprayed on the window panes. The seasonal decorations couldn’t disguise that this was a facility for people who might not experience another Christmas.

I knew that my mother was one of those who wouldn’t recover, and that in all probability this would be her last Christmas. She knew it, too. Secretly, my heart was breaking. But I assumed a smile for her sake. This was a big day for her. She had lived long enough to fulfill her promise. Incredibly, she was very happy.

I propelled her wheelchair through each reception room and treatment area on every floor of the building. She carried in her lap a large basket heaped high with the gift bags she had painstakingly assembled. Each patient in the center that day received one, as did their loved ones, whose despair was often more visible than that of the patients.

My mother had a smile and a comforting touch for all of them. As people always had done, they gravitated to her. For the most part, they were strangers, yet she communicated to them an understanding that can only be reached through similar suffering.

Though she couldn’t speak, her eyes conveyed her grace, her joie de vivre for however long it might last, and her indomitable spirit. Upon seeing her in her silly hat, bleak faces formed smiles. Eyes staring dully into an uncertain future became alight with optimism. People too weak to sit up unassisted, found the strength to squeeze my mother’s hand with gratitude.

Cancer is ugly. But the expressions on the faces of those patients that day were beautiful. For a short time, their misery gave way to gladness. Their hope was renewed. They experienced the essence of Christmas. They saw Santa Claus.

And I believed.

-- Sandra Brown


And with this extraordinary story of hope, the second annual Bookreporter.com Holiday Author Blog series draws to a close. Many thanks to the 62 authors who have contributed heartfelt, funny and profound pieces, and to all of you who have read along with us daily --- sometimes twice --- and enjoyed these wonderful memories with us. Best wishes from all of us at Bookreporter.com for a happy and safe holiday. See you next year!

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Rainwater, Sandra Brown

This Christmas Eve, Susan Arnout Smith --- author of THE TIMER GAME and OUT AT NIGHT --- shares a moving story about the selflessness and generosity of one young child to another during a time of need, while also passing on one of the best gifts of all --- literacy.


My youngest child --- I have two --- is now a senior at Stanford, but when the kids were little, one of my favorite jobs was Glitter Mom. I was the mother who breezed into class bearing gifts: colored paper, glue, bits of feathers. I loved the job because it required little and gave much: I was in my kid’s classroom having fun: putting faces to the names in the stories my child told me after school; seeing for myself how the teacher worked her magic; watching from a warm and companionable distance my child playing nice and not running with scissors.

All of that changed at Cabrillo Elementary in San Diego the year Martha was eight.

Mrs. Hille listened in silence to my practiced spiel about how I was a writer. How I loved being in the classroom. But how, see, I only had time to do it one hour every other week. Actually.
The pause went on awhile too long. “Usually I just cut things out,” I offered. “Mop up the glue. Pick up scraps at the end. I’m very good at cleaning things up.”

Which was a lie, but she didn’t need to know that.

Another pause.

“You’re offering me an enormous gift,” Mrs. Hille said finally. “I need to think of the best way to use this.”

A month went by. “Still thinking,” Mrs. Hille said.

Another month. One day when I was gathering up Martha after school, Mrs. Hille stopped me. “Okay, I know what I need you to do.”

She laid out the details. My heart stalled.

She wanted me to teach Esteban to read. I knew this kid. All the mothers did.

Esteban (I’ve changed his name, but the story’s real) had been thrown off the bus as an eight year old for mooning the other kids. He’d spent time in the principal’s office for talking back, shoving, bending back kids’ fingers, throwing books, pencils, wads of gum. Tripping. Pummeling. Smashing body parts.

He was a bus-in kid from the Barrio. Mrs. Hille had spent the past two months testing all the kids in class. Somehow, Esteban had managed to skate in two languages. He barely knew the alphabet.

“This is third grade,” Mrs. Hille said. “My theory is, if we haven’t caught them by the end of third grade, they’re lost. Or can be.”

Esteban squirmed as I sat with him in the rear of the class, listening to a recording of a singer bleating out alphabet letters. He rocked his chair back onto two legs. Made oinking noises. Picked up a pencil and measured the distance between his desk and the back of the neck of a little girl quietly absorbed in Mrs. Hille’s lecture on fruit bats.

“We will listen to this,” I said. My voice had an edge.

“Or else what?” Esteban yawned. He hefted the pencil thoughtfully between his fingers.

“Not an or else what. It’s an and then.”

I was riffing and he must have known it. His posture tensed like one of those hyenas in nature films going after the slowest antelope. He stared at me with flat brown eyes. There was no light in these eyes, but he put down his pencil. “Go on.”

“And then.” I was at a loss. “And then. We go outside. We walk around the playground. But once. Only once.”

He rocked his chair back to its normal position.

He listened.

Outside, we had just passed the jungle gym and swings when I asked what his dream was for himself. About reading.

He stopped in his tracks as if he’d been whacked by a baseball between the eyes. He took a small staggering step. He muttered a single word.

“What?”

There was something soft now in his eyes, eyes bright with despair and a kind of fury. He said it again, his voice so low I had to strain to hear. “Goosebumps.”

I bent down so that I was eye level. “I promise you, Esteban. I promise you. That by the end of this year, you’ll be reading Goosebumps.”

Immediately, panic engulfed me. What was I thinking? What was I promising? I stepped up the number of times per week I came to class. I pushed him. He pushed back. He learned.

A couple of months in, Christmas was coming. I wanted to buy him books. Wrap them up. Present them as a gift for his hard work. As a promise that he was on track. That his dream was not out of sight.

You’re thinking my favorite book to give was a Goosebumps, right?

Wrong. My favorite book to give, was one I didn’t give at all.

Martha, my beautiful eight year old, my little girl who suddenly had to not even share me with another child, but relinquish me to that other child three times a week for intensive work --- my beautiful little girl, when I explained why I was sacrificing my time with her --- and it was a sacrifice for me, it was --- when I explained how he couldn’t read yet, and how important it was, and how I was going to buy him books and give them as a present, my tender-hearted, generous little girl did this.

One night, as I was tucking her in, I felt something hard on her chest under the covers. Resting on her chest were books.

“They’re my favorite ones, Mommy. My favorite books.” She took a deep breath. Her small hand patted the books gently. She was giving something she cherished to another kid.

So. My all-time favorite, ever, book that was given, was that Christmas years ago, when my eight year old passed along to another kid the joy of reading a book that starts with the magical incantation: In the great. . . green room. . . there was. . . a telephone . .and. . . a red balloon. . . and. . .a picture of a cow. . . Jumping! Over the moon.

And yes. By the end of the year, Esteban was reading Goosebumps.

-- Susan Arnout Smith


Join us tomorrow, as Sandra Brown recounts a tale of love and loss, and sharing the true meaning of the holidays.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Out at Night, Susan Arnout Smith

Sandra Dallas --- author of eight novels including NEW MERCIES, TALLGRASS and PRAYERS FOR SALE --- shares an extraordinary story of strength and determination, as well as a few simple gestures which represent the bonds that hold her family together.


Several years ago, my brother-in-law, Ted, had a massive stroke. He was paralyzed, not expected to live, and in the unlikely event Ted beat the odds, my sister Mary was told, he would never walk again, never leave the hospital, in fact. Ted refused to accept the inevitable and promised my sister through a system of blinks they had set up to communicate that in 18 months, he would walk their daughter down the aisle at her wedding. Embarking on a strenuous course of physical therapy, Ted learned to talk again and to walk, dragging himself between two hand rails, then moving up to a walker and finally, a cane. In August, 2007, on a brilliant day in suburban Chicago, Ted did indeed escort his daughter down the aisle to her waiting bridegroom. Love for the young couple and pride at Ted’s triumph brought tears to the eyes of all of us who witnessed the ceremony.

So it was fitting, I thought after the wedding, that I dedicate my upcoming book, PRAYERS FOR SALE, to Ted “for your grace and courage.” The book was not due out until April, but I wrapped up an Advanced Reader Copy and sent it to Ted last Christmas.

My sister called to say they all cried when they read the dedication, and Ted wrote, telling me, “I cannot recall ever being so soundly touched by any gift which brought so much meaning and emotion. The ‘grace and courage,’ ironically, probably are more a result of your own sister’s determination, more often seen as Dallas stubbornness…Your special sisterhood with Mary has sustained her so often and, therefore, made us infinitely stronger. PRAYERS FOR SALE and its dedication magnify that sisterhood, and gave her the power to lift me, and us, through.”

While I gave the book to Ted for Christmas, his note was the better present, one that I cherish, because rereading it reminds me of the special bonds that bind my family, bonds that have sustained us through joy and sorrow, and they are a far greater gift than any book.

-- Sandra Dallas


Tomorrow, Susan Arnout Smith reflects on the best present she never actually gave.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Sandra Dallas, Tallgrass

Bestselling novelist Barbara Delinsky --- author of WHILE MY SISTER SLEEPS, THE SECRET BETWEEN US, and our latest Women's Fiction Author Spotlight title, NOT MY DAUGHTER --- revisits a past Christmas during which she'd offered one of her own books to a friend in need.


Some authors give their own books as holiday gifts. I wish I could do this, but the thought of it makes me squirm. I mean, my book can’t be compared with a bona fide gift --- or so my thinking goes. I did make an exception one year, though, and remember the details to this day.

THREE WISHES was never a holiday release. An oldie first published in 1997, it made its hardcover debut in September and its paperback one the following July. The setting is a small Vermont town, the protagonist a very special young woman, and yes, the plot does encompass Christmas. But it isn’t a Christmas Christmas book, if you know what I mean.

That said, it could be. The holidays are emotional times, and THREE WISHES is a tear-jerker, with a spiritual twist so wrenching that some of my readers have never forgiven me for it. At the same time, others have written me the most heart-warming letters in praise of this book.

Then came my friend Rebecca. I never actually met her in person --- we were introduced by a mutual friend, and our relationship was a long-distance one carried out by email. She was fighting a tough battle with breast cancer, of which I am a survivor, and though our correspondence began with how best to stare down this disease, it quickly moved on to things like family, knitting, and food. We also discussed books, though our tastes were different; she preferred mystery and intrigue, while I liked family drama. To my knowledge, she had never read any of my books.

As the holidays approached, her illness worsened, and our hopes dwindled. I wanted to send her something to engross her for a time, even lift her spirits, but I didn’t want her to think I was rushing a Christmas that she might not make. Sending her one of my books seemed like the perfect thing to do, and, of all of my books, THREE WISHES felt like a match.

She read it. I know this for fact, because she phoned me in tears to thank me for sending it, and we discussed it at length. More to the point, we discussed the theme of life as a gift that is more about quality than quantity. We talked of Bree Miller and her newborn son, then of Rebecca’s children, who, like Bree’s Wyatt, would keep her spirit alive.

That was the first and last time I ever heard Rebecca’s voice. Her emails grew truncated, then stopped, and shortly before the holidays, she passed away. Her family told me it was a peaceful death. I like to think a tiny part of that had to do with THREE WISHES and our talk.

I haven’t given another of my novels as a gift since, but sense that may change come January, when my newest, NOT MY DAUGHTER, is published. This book, too, celebrates babies, family reconciliation, and the gift of life. As holiday themes go, it’s right on the mark.

-- Barbara Delinsky


Tomorrow, Sandra Dallas joins us with an uplifting piece about overcoming the most dire of obstacles.

Labels: Barbara Delinsky, holiday-blogs-2009, Not My Daughter

Lynne Hinton --- author of THE THINGS I KNOW BEST, FRIENDSHIP CAKE, and the newly released CHRISTMAS CAKE --- revisits childhood memories of her grandfather, and the literary legacy he'd bequeathed to her after his passing.


I knew my grandfather kept diaries because I had seen him write in them when I was a child. I’d be sitting at the kitchen table finishing breakfast when he’d come in from the farm, wash his hands at the sink, reach for a pencil or pen in a drawer by the phone and pull down a small leather bound black book from the tall kitchen cabinet, the one I couldn’t reach, and jot notes, items of receipts, matters of what I presumed to be a personal nature. Every morning when I would see him come into the house, making his way in my direction, and open that cabinet, I had a sense that what he was doing was sacred, that this daily ritual he participated in was important, that it mattered a great deal to him.

My grandfather lived in eastern North Carolina, grew up poor but made a good living farming cotton and more importantly, buying and selling what turned out to be valuable real estate property. Because of his family’s meager income, Granddaddy Hinton only finished fourth grade, forced to leave school and work as a sharecropper like his father. Because of what he didn’t receive, he always stressed the importance of finishing school to his children and grandchildren. He valued education more than going to church and my grandfather valued going to church, serving as a deacon in the Baptist Church for most of his adult life.

While he was alive I never read his diaries; of course, nobody did. But I imagined the things he would note, the details of his work, the events he wanted to remember. One day I asked him about his records, how long he had kept them, and he lifted me from the floor, placed me on the counter, and opened that sacred cabinet. I could see stacks and stacks of those small black books and he replied that he had kept a diary ever since he was able to buy his first cow. And then, without pulling one out to show me, he lifted me off the counter and placed me on the floor. “What grade are you in?” he asked. “Fourth,” I answered. “Well then, maybe it’s time for you to get your own diary.” and he drove me into town to the stationary shop and bought me my own small black leather bound diary. It became the first of many.

Granddaddy Hinton died when I was nineteen. I was sophomore in college and his funeral was during the Christmas break. After a very melancholy Christmas family gathering when all of my aunts and uncles, cousins, and siblings had left and I was staying on a few days with my grandmother, she walked me into the kitchen, explaining that she had a special gift she had saved for me --- one she knew my grandfather would want me to have. She opened that tall forbidden cabinet and took out a stack of my grandfather’s diaries. “Pick a few,” she said, “and the others I will hang onto.”

For an entire afternoon and evening, I read those diaries, watching the days of my grandfather pass by. The daily entries were short, not very informative, details of a sale or a note of a visit from a child or grandchild, certainly nothing intimate or confidential, nothing like the things I imagined were in there, nothing like the things I wrote in my diaries. But as I read my grandfather’s words, many of them spelled incorrectly, the grammar all wrong, I realized that more than just a need to make record of the significant events, my grandfather, whose spelling was atrocious and who could hardly make a sentence, was a person who loved words. I realized from my grandfather’s diaries, covering a span of fifty years, that he was the first writer in the family. He was the one who taught me the importance of getting the story down on a paper.

Following my grandmother’s instructions, I picked four diaries to keep, his first, two from the middle years when he was buying up the land that he had farmed but never owned, and his last, one that spoke of his battle of cancer. Short sentences, brief simple words naming his triumphs and his suffering. When I showed my choices to my grandmother, still sick from grief, she nodded and smiled, “I think he always wanted to be a writer,” she said. “Maybe his diaries will help make a writer out of you.”

And funny thing, maybe they did.

-- Lynne Hinton


Tomorrow, Barbara Delinsky recalls the one time she'd broken her self-established rule on gifting copies of her own works.

Labels: Christmas Cake, holiday-blogs-2009, Lynne Hinton

Jamie Ford, author of HOTEL AT THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET, exposes his inner "alpha-geek" by revealing the unlikely book that claimed the top spot on his Christmas wish list one year.


My most memorable holiday book moment is somewhat akin to a bikini wax --- painful and somewhat embarrassing, so I’ll just let ‘er rip.

It was (wait for it) a dictionary.

Yes, an honest-to-goodness New World Dictionary, College Edition, in all its hardbound, five-pound glory. I was twelve and I loved it. Then again, I was an alpha-geek, prone to reading the Encyclopedia Britannica for its entertainment value and actually wanted a real dictionary for Christmas, not one of those weak-sauce pocket versions.

Because when you think about it, back in Paleolithic times, before www.merriam-webster.com, this was the Marine Corp Manual of dictionaries. Not only did it have full-color “bonus” pages with all the state flags (to which my mom and I deftly added the capitals in the margins), but it also had pages dedicated to crustaceans, insects, jewels and gems, poisonous plants, identification charts for hardwoods, and that all-important diorama of the human anatomy --- sexless and sterile, much to my disappointment. Plus, there were guides to birds’ eggs, seashells, styles of painting, and even liverworts (liverworts, people!)

Granted, it’s a little dated. And sure, it doesn’t have trendy words like: dirty bomb, flash mob, and unfriend. But it still has the important swear words.

It’s ironic how some addle-minded schools will ban books like THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, but leave that fount of all things four-lettered --- the dictionary --- just laying around. Even today I can remember that a certain word was preceded by the word fuchsin --- a purplish-red aniline dye. Some day that bit of trivia will be my savior on "Jeopardy."

And that same dictionary still sits on my shelf. It’s like the family bible. I could write birthdays, wedding dates and funerals on the inside cover and pass it down.

But the best part is that my kids now use it. The cover is duct-taped, the pages are dog-eared, and we highlight the words we look up --- each person leaving a little hash mark on the page, mileposts on their own academic journeys.

And they still laugh at the inscription from my parents, presented December 25, 1980: "Batteries not included."

Wishing you a book-filled holiday season!

-- Jamie Ford


This afternoon, Lynne Hinton joins us with musings on the love of words and stories passed on to her from her late grandfather.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford

Katrina Kenison, author of MITTEN STRINGS FOR GOD, describes a lovely holiday ritual shared with her family that, over the course of two decades, has evolved into something far more meaningful than how it began.

Her family also takes center stage in her latest memoir, THE GIFT OF AN ORDINARY DAY; you can watch a video of Katrina reading an excerpt at a recent event by clicking here.


What do you give to a baby who is born exactly one week before Christmas? To our friends, many of whom worked in publishing, the answer was obvious: Christmas books! And so it was that by the time our firstborn son was a week old, our collection of Christmas books had already begun to take shape: an illustrated JINGLE BELLS, a lovely old hardcover copy of Margaret Wise Brown’s CHRISTMAS IN THE BARN, Tomie dePaola’s irresistible MERRY CHRISTMAS, STREGA NONA.

Henry was all of six pounds, barely awake for more than an hour at a time, but what I most remember about that first Christmas of parenthood is the tiny velour Santa suit we dressed him in, and an image of my mom sitting in the rocking chair, reading aloud to my week-old son. “Well, we’ve bonded for life,” she announced, as she handed him back to me. “And I can tell, he’s going to be a reader. He really seemed to listen to the words.”

Three years later, Jack was born. Our library of Christmas books continued to grow, and with it, a treasured family tradition. The day after Thanksgiving, the boys would insist that my husband carry the box of Christmas books up from the basement. Much as we love setting up the tree, decorating the mantle, and stringing lights around the doorways, in our family it has always been the ritual of bringing out the Christmas books that spells the real beginning of the holiday season.

All through the years of my sons’ growing up, even the busiest of December days ended with a hush, a few special moments that became sacred to us all. I would read aloud, the lights turned low, the Christmas tree twinkling in the corner and the basket of beloved books at our feet, each one so familiar that the boys could recite the words long before they knew how to sound them out.

Sometimes, if it was late, we would choose just one book before bed, but there were other evenings when we would read for an hour or more, slowly making our way through one volume after another: THE TOMTEN, CHRISTMAS TROLLS, O LITTLE FIR TREE, THE POLAR EXPRESS, THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, THE GIFT FROM ST. NICHOLAS, THE CHRISTMAS MIRACLE OF JONATHAN TOOMEY.

Our readings took us to distant countries and long-gone times, other cultures, other families, and other celebrations. But what I loved most about our nightly tradition was the simple pleasure of this quiet time together --- time to reweave our connections with one another and with the true meaning of the season. The stories we read again and again were like beacons along the path, reminding us that love, compassion, generosity, and faith are the most precious gifts of all.

My sons are seventeen and twenty now, and although my husband still carries the box of Christmas books up from the basement on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, they sit, untouched, in a pile in the living room for weeks. And then one night, for old time’s sake, after Henry’s returned from college and Jack is home as well, we turn the lights down low and gather round the tree.

There are two books in particular that have stood the test of time. Our all-time favorite, still read with childlike enthusiasm by the two nearly grown men in our house, is John Burningham’s brilliantly simple HARVEY SLUMFENBURGER'S CHRISTMAS PRESENT. Year after year, we read it, laugh, and wonder what might be in the sack that Santa delivers to the top of Roly Poly Mountain. Next, we slide our copy of Truman Capote’s A CHRISTMAS MEMORY from its red cardboard slipcase and take turns reading this most special classic aloud to each other. Always, we pause at our favorite description: “a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies.” Always, I get a lump in my throat at the end, and have to hand the book over to someone else to finish. “Life separates us,” Capote writes, years after his beloved Christmas co-conspirator Sook has gone to her grave. And so it does. Which is why, now more than ever, I treasure the Christmas moment, however brief, when my husband and sons and I sit together and read aloud to one another, just as we’ve always done.

-- Katrina Kenison


Tomorrow, Jamie Ford and Lynne Hinton each share their favorite holiday presents in the form of unlikely reads.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day

I grew up in a farmhouse full of books. My father, Robert Bly, is a poet; my mother, Carol Bly, was a short story writer. Poetry doesn’t pay, so there was very little money, though books managed to find their way into the house anyway. Christmas meant a stack of novels, emblazoned with my mother’s curly handwriting: Madison, Minnesota, Christmas, 1973. Or 1962 (the books started the year I was born). Or 2007, the last Christmas she was alive.

One year when I was around ten, finances must have been particularly tough. Though I realize in retrospect that the household was clearly strained, at the time I had no idea. We didn’t get a tree until Christmas Eve, which seemed exciting and novel. The next morning, there was the tree, stockings, and presents. Perfect joy!

Until I realized that there were no books under that tree. You see, if you happened to get some money on Christmas Eve in a farmhouse outside Madison, Minnesota (population 2,242), you couldn’t just drive to town and buy books for your children. They had to be ordered from afar, prepaid, and mailed in time to get to a rural route address.

I still remember looking across the crumpled wrapping paper at the Barbie doll I had asked for, and feeling a grueling sense of betrayal. I had pleaded with my feminist mother for that Barbie. But what I had counted on, without even knowing it, was the stack of novels.

My teenage son has a Kindle and free run of Amazon.com. Still, every year as I watch him rip open a stack of novels, I say a silent thanks to my parents for finding enough money for years of books --- and then another thanks for the Christmas when there were none. Stinging disappointment taught me a valuable lesson: that books will always matter more to me than
the world’s wide and various treasures.

-- Eloisa James


Check back this evening, as Katrina Kenison lists some of her family's favorite holiday stories, which they read aloud together every year.

Labels: A Duke of her Own, Eloisa James, holiday-blogs-2009

Cody McFadyen --- author of four thrillers, including THE DARKER SIDE and ABANDONED --- discusses some of his family's most cherished holiday traditions, and the one in particular that he knows will always continue.


We were poor when I was growing up. I’m not talking the "couldn’t get the newest iPhone" kind of poor. I mean impoverished. We ate spam and fried onions and all our furniture were hand-me-downs. This was back in the days when even the best TVs had rabbit-ears, and long before such a thing as the internet was available in the public domain. You tended to get your entertainment from two sources: life itself, and books, books, books. Christmas brought the two together.

We had all kinds of traditions. We each had a "special ornament." This was an ornament selected and given to each of the grandchildren by the grandparents. I got mine in 1976 --- a sterling silver Santa, with the year engraved on the back. It was hung by me on my grandparents tree for many Christmases, and was passed on to my parents when my grandparents were gone. It’s pulled out every year and has hung on one branch or another for thirty-three years. It’s probably the single longest running tradition in my life.

There was a complex gift-wrapping tradition amongst the men in my family. It was called "present disguise" (among other things, depending on how aggravated someone got), and consisted of packing a present in such a way as to make it impossible to guess the true contents. One memorable occasion: My uncle had gotten my dad a wallet. He put the wallet in a small box and threw in three or four marbles. That box was taped inside a bigger box. My uncle cut a hole in the bigger box and stuck the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels about halfway through the hole. Then he wrapped the whole affair.

My dad picked it up and shook it carefully. He heard the marbles rattling around. He examined the strange, wrapped cylinder sticking out from the side. “Well,” he said, “based on the weight --- I’m going to guess it’s a wallet.”

Enjoyment of Christmas itself was the most sacred thing, but after that came the books. My family is a family that reads, and it always has been. I went through my parents' photo albums the other day and was struck by how many candid shots of someone caught reading a book I found. When we were poor, we used the library most of the time, but somehow I always got books at Christmas. I can only recall one Christmas where that wasn’t the case, and to be fair, that was before I knew how to read.

I have memories of curling up on my grandparents hearth, floor pillow at my back, book in my hands, certain that the world was a safe, secure and decent place. Safe enough that I could just let it all go and immerse myself in the world I was reading about. I know better now, of course, but those memories still sustain me. They keep me from lapsing into cynicism, which is possibly the primary purpose of good childhood memories.

A new Christmas is almost here and I have to sit back and compare. Things have changed, in that slow, living-of-life way that makes it all seem normal. My parents are senior citizens, and my grandparents are long gone. My cousin is in his early twenties and he just had his first child, a son of his own. I got that silver Santa from my grandparents almost thirteen years before he was even born, and I remember him when he was a baby, too. Mind blowing.

But here we are again, and one thing I can promise you hasn’t changed: plenty of books will be gifted.

You know, now that I think about it --- giving books at Christmas may actually be the single longest running tradition in my life.

As it should be.

Merry Christmas.

-- Cody McFadyen


Tomorrow, Eloisa James and Katrina Kenison each share stories of gratitude over their families and their shared love of the written word.

Labels: Cody Mcfadyen, holiday-blogs-2009, The Abandoned

This morning, Masha Hamilton --- author of THE CAMEL BOOKMOBILE and 31 HOURS --- illustrates that great stories are not limited to just works of fiction, as she discusses a treasured recipe book and its ability to connect her with her family's rich past.


As a child, I remember overhearing my mom say, “Masha thinks books are the nicest gift in the world.” It was true then, and is now, and I’ve received some memorable book presents. But perhaps my favorite is one my dad gave me a couple decades ago, published originally in 1931 in Topeka, Kansas: THE HOUSEHOLD SEARCHLIGHT RECIPE BOOK. I treasure the book even though I don’t think I’ve ever actually used any of its recipes --- despite a wide variety of tantalizing possibilities, including Apricot Horseradish Sandwiches, Egg Apples, and Turnip Soufflé. I love it because it belonged to my grandmother, Jess.

Jess Hamilton was a schoolteacher in the tiny desert town of Morristown, Arizona --- one of two who taught the entire town’s kids, first through twelfth grades. It was during the Great Depression, and many students went barefoot and hungry, so she began Morristown’s first hot school lunches program. She and her fellow teacher took turns cooking a large pot of food, leaving it simmering on the stove in the morning, and then, with help from the older kids, picking it up at lunchtime and carting it back to the schoolhouse. In the mid-1940s, the government offered to pay a subsidy for school lunches for students from low-income families, but Jess refused the money. She was afraid they would try to tell her what to cook.

My grandfather, Jack, was Morristown’s station master for Southern Pacific Railroad, and their house was two dozen steps from the tracks. The Depression’s high unemployment gave rise to hobos, the out-of-work who wandered the rails. Many nights, Jack would swing into the house, calling at the doorway, “Jessie! I’ve brought company for dinner!” “That’s fine,” she would answer, and another mouth would join Jesse, Jack, their four children, and often others, for the meal.

I suspect, and the clues bear out, that THE HOUSEHOLD SEARCHLIGHT RECIPE BOOK was one of Jesse’s most important and oft-referenced volumes. I well remember Grams’s kitchen, and can imagine her leaning into the book while standing next to the stove. The pages bear the stains of gravy and chocolate and Crisco. This, befitting the times, is a no-frills book: there are no color photographs, no pictures at all, just recipe after recipe, six to ten per page, for 320 pages.

Jess also wrote recipes on the inside and back covers. These include “Bee’s Persimmons,” “Jeanie’s Salad Dressing” and “Mrs. R’s Cookies.” A few recipes that she wrote on scraps of paper and stuck into the book also survive. One is for “Oxford Cookies,” and she notes at the end that this has been a family recipe since 1680. I reprint it in full below:

“Rub 1 cup butter or Crisco into 4 cups of flour. Add 2 cups sugar, 1 cup of cream (or canned milk) 1 teaspoon soda, 1 teaspoon vanilla. Mix on board, roll thin, cut and bake in a slow oven.”

One quality to books that I’ve always loved is that they are a way of super-communicating: they connect us to one another through time and space. They link not only the Australian with the Zimbabwean, the young Hawaiian surfer with the aging Nepalese monk with the Afghan woman in a burqa. They also link the living to the dead. When I hold THE HOUSEHOLD SEARCHLIGHT RECIPE BOOK in my hands, I feel Grams. I am transported back to a time when she fed both the stomachs and the minds of Morristown’s kids, and my grandfather befriended hobos and wrote poems, and their house shook with the passing freight cars, and my dad was a child in a cowboy hat who rode burros and was the darling of his three saucy sisters.

Yes, it’s a recipe book. But for me, it is a volume of a thousand stories.

-- Masha Hamilton


Check back this afternoon, as Cody McFadyen reveals the single, longest-running tradition in his life.

Labels: 31 Hours, holiday-blogs-2009, Masha Hamilton

Susan Shapiro Barash, author of TOXIC FRIENDS, muses on fond Hanukkah memories and passing on a love for the written word from generation to generation.


Growing up on a barrier island on the Jersey shore, there were no bookstores. The big treat in our family was to come to New York to visit our grandparents and to walk along Fifth Avenue, stopping at the Doubleday bookstore. The rich selection of books was enticing and exhilarating, and I attribute my love of books to those early days in this particular store.

At holiday time, my parents would shop in the city and bring gifts back home. I was always asked what I wanted for Hanukkah, and I always wanted books, relishing the thick gold wrapping paper with "Doubleday" scrawled across it in a black ink and the anticipation of reading everything from Louisa May Alcott to Yeats to Jane Austen, depending on the year. My senior year in high school, my mother asked me what books I wanted, and I chose THE MILL ON THE FLOSS and THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Of course she came through, and those very books stand on my bookshelf still, through marriage, children, divorce, and remarriage.

If we fast forward to today, each of my three children would describe their own similar, if not identical, romance with books. And so, each year for Hanukkah, when I ask them what they want and the book orders come in, I know that despite our changing world, the vicissitudes of the internet and the advent of the kindle, that the sheer joy in unwrapping a book (now wrapped in Barnes and Noble gift paper) prevails, and the unmitigated experience of reading it remains.

-- Susan Shapiro Barash


Join us tomorrow, as Masha Hamilton reconnects with long-departed loved ones with the help of a beloved family cookbook.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Susan Shapiro Barash, Toxic Friends

HOMER'S ODYSSEY author Gwen Cooper reflects on her lifelong obsession with a different Homer, and what the numerous translations of his work have come to represent in her own life.


Long before I had a blind cat named Homer, I was obsessed with Homer the blind Greek poet. My lifelong love affair with all things Greek mythology began in the third grade, when my English teacher, Mrs. Hannah, gave me a copy of Edith Hamilton’s MYTHOLOGY as a holiday gift. “I thought you might enjoy this,” she said, and she probably had no idea how right she’d end up being.

Looking back, it was my desire to read more than the summaries of the stories Ms. Hamilton provided --- to read the original stories themselves --- that first propelled me from children’s literature to literature generally. I dug up the battered old Samuel Butler translation of Homer’s ODYSSEY in our school library and held on to it for so long that, three years later when it was time to move on to middle school, I was told that in order to graduate I’d have to reimburse the library for the cost of the book.

I still have that copy somewhere, thoroughly dog-eared, thumbed-through, and marked up.

In the years since then, the progressively newer translations of the ODYSSEY that I’ve received as holiday gifts are a snapshot of where I was at that point in my life. The Fitzgerald translation is me with my first job in high school, working at a local bookstore, and using my employee discount to splurge on a little gift for myself during a holiday-season sale. The Lattimore translation is me as a new college graduate with my first “grown-up” boyfriend, who unearthed a first edition to give me for Hanukkah. The Fagles translation is me less than eleven months after moving from Miami to New York, and two months after turning 30. A friend back in Miami --- who knew nothing about the Odyssey and cared even less --- was assured by a helpful B&N clerk that this newest (at the time) translation would make a perfect “missing you at the holidays” gift for someone like me who just couldn’t get enough Homer in her life.

Not too long before Thanksgiving this year, I returned to Miami to give a reading from my Homer’s ODYSSEY at the Miami Book Fair. In the audience was Mrs. Hannah. “I just knew you’d be a writer someday,” she told me, pressing my hand, when the reading was over.

As it turns out, Mrs. Hannah was right about a lot of things.

-- Gwen Cooper


Please check back tomorrow, as Susan Shapiro Barash shares fond Hanukkah memories of Austen, Shakespeare and Alcott.

Labels: Gwen Cooper, holiday-blogs-2009, Homer's Odyssey

Ann Herendeen --- author of PHYLLIDA AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF PHILANDER, as well as the upcoming PRIDE/PREJUDICE --- revisits the Christmas she learned to read and the literary presents that followed, which have helped to shape the writer she is today.


Anybody who’s read my first novel, PHYLLIDA AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF PHILANDER, knows I’m unlikely to have much in the way of heartwarming holiday stories. The morning scene of carnage when I was a child is the standard one for twentieth-century middle-class households: exhausted parents, too many toys, and the day ends in tears as the cat pulls the tree over onto the neighbor’s toddler.

But once I learned to read, and received a book or two at Christmas, there was a shift in mood. From driving my parents crazy only by proxy, with thousands of Lego parts scattered on the living-room floor or the umpteenth iteration of Chatty Cathy’s limited repertoire of phrases, I was now able to torment them directly. E.B. White’s CHARLOTTE'S WEB was my first weapon of choice. Although I claimed to read it “all by myself,” this is something of an exaggeration. For one thing, I needed help with the longer or less familiar words, and most of the subtleties --- such as the farm family named “Arable” --- were lost on me. For another, I found the experience so delightful --- the characters, the story, and the amazing concept of an entire imaginary world brought to life through words printed in ink on paper --- that I felt an irresistible, and surely admirable urge to share my happiness. And thus began my habit of targeted reading aloud, to make sure nobody missed any of the great lines. My favorite was the cynical rat, Templeton, telling the other nervous animals as he rolled a rotten goose egg away, “I know what I’m doing. I handle stuff like this all the time.” That struck my five-year-old self as priceless --- and it still does; which is why, I suppose, I write comedy.

The next torture session occurred a few years later with THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, by Norton Juster. This was something new: an entire book based on figures of speech and clichés, cobbled together to make an actual story with characters and a plot. I had never heard many of these terms, or not often enough to know they were common phrases, and as the sophisticated humor dawned on me, I was incapable of keeping all this ecstasy to myself. Every page was full of gems: the Lethergarians who inhabit the Doldrums; the feast in Dictionopolis, where people eat their words; Dr. Dischord and his assistant, the awful Dynne (whose grandfather, the dreadful Rauw, perished in the great silence epidemic of 1712); the fearsome monsters who lurk in the Mountains of Ignorance; and the princesses Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason, banished to the Castle in the Air.

I don’t mean to discount the excellent illustrations, by Garth Williams (CW) and Jules Feiffer (PT) --- only that, even then, words stimulated my imagination more than pictures. Never in my wildest dreams could I be a visual artist, whereas playing with words…maybe, someday, that I could do.

The entire universe went briefly out of whack when I was fourteen. With my father unemployed, there could be no expensive presents. My parents borrowed books from the public library and --- oh, sacrilege! --- read them aloud to each other! The biggest hit was a set of Robert Benchley humor pieces. While I sat in the next room, sobbing in adolescent rapture over WUTHERING HEIGHTS, my parents, equally tearful, howled with laughter at Benchley’s explanation of the surest way to get up on time in the morning: have someone burst into the bedroom with the announcement, “The men are here for the trunks.”

Luckily, things righted themselves soon enough. And I think those first books led me inevitably to where I am now, navigating the treacherous terrain between comedy and romance, between the lighthearted and the profound, still searching for the Happy Medium giggling over her crystal ball, as portrayed by Madeleine L’Engle in A WRINKLE IN TIME. But by that Christmas, thank goodness, I had learned to read silently to myself.

-- Ann Herendeen


This evening, Gwen Cooper fondly remembers a thoughtful 3rd grade English teacher who sparked her lifelong love of Greek mythology.

Labels: Ann Herendeen, holiday-blogs-2009, Pride/Prejudice

On this sixth night of Hanukkah, Steve Luxenberg --- author of ANNIE'S GHOSTS --- illustrates that one doesn't necessarily need to observe Christmas in order to celebrate its traditions and revel in the sense of love, family and togetherness that the holiday brings.


I can’t shed any light on whether it snowed for six days and six nights when poet Dylan Thomas was twelve, or if it was twelve days and twelve nights when he was six, but I can say that we have read aloud his A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES on ten Christmases since I was thirty and six times in the past six years --- and on Christmas Day 2009, we will gather to read it aloud once again.

This tradition --- those numbers qualify as a tradition by now, I think --- doesn’t begin with me or my family. For much of my younger life, as well as my wife’s, the hours of December 25 passed quietly, without presents or trees or ornaments or mistletoe or fanfare of any sort, unless one of the eight days of Hanukkah happened to fall on the same day as Christmas.

Some of my Christian friends found it hard to believe that I didn’t feel left out. Isn’t it hard, they asked, to have nothing to do on Christmas with all this merriment taking place around you?

In a word: no. The glow of Hanukkah candles burns bright in my seasonal memory, but the appearance of my Baltimore neighborhood’s outdoor Christmas lights merely reminds me that fall has arrived, dotting the autumn air with red and green and white, often before the leaves have begun their annual gold-and-orange ritual. I enjoy the traditions of Christmas, but they are not my traditions, and they have never held any special meaning for me.

Dylan Thomas’s winter wonderland changed that. My wife, our two children (now 23 and 25) and I have become part of another family’s Christmas tradition, the tradition of our good friends Scott Shane and Francie Weeks. They no longer remember exactly what prompted them, on Christmas Day 1976 --- their first Christmas of their married life --- to read aloud the story of Mrs. Prothero and her fire, of the Useful and Useless Presents, of the Uncles, “who put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept,” and of “the few small aunts,” aunties Dosie, Bessie and Hannah, “who laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.”

But now, once a year, wherever Scott and Francie may be, home or away, the slim volume comes out for a re-reading. A once-blank page in the book lists the year, place and names of those in attendance. The book has marked Christmases in Baltimore and Moscow, New England and Merry Old England. Scott and Francie had no children when they started this tradition; now their three children, ranging in age from 19 to 26, have never known a Christmas without a visit to that mystical, almost mythical snowbound land near the edge of “the carol-singing sea.”

If you asked me in July, I couldn’t tell you the story’s details or which passages I had read aloud the previous December or why I smile every time at the image of “the Uncles breathing like dolphins.” But I can tell you why that this quiet, quirky, very Welsh narrative has become a part of my family of four’s holiday season: it reminds us of friendship and warmth, of being welcomed into another family’s special day, of a tradition with a special meaning all its own.

This Christmas, sometime after dinner, we will gather by the snap-crackle-pop of the fire, all nine of us if we’re lucky, and we will take turns, listening and laughing as Thomas’s story unfolds once again. Then we will say goodnight, go out in the chill darkness for the ride home, and we will sleep.

-- Steve Luxenberg


Tomorrow, Ann Herendeen discusses how she learned to navigate between the light-hearted and the profound, while Gwen Cooper traces major life milestones through numerous versions of the same set of stories.

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, holiday-blogs-2009, Steve Luxenberg

Cartoonist Larry Gonick --- creator of FROM THE BASTILLE TO BAGHDAD, the latest installment in the bestselling The Cartoon History of the Modern World series --- reflects on the slow emergence of comics onto the mainstream literary scene, and revels in how his holiday memories, along with his choice in reading material, have vastly improved as a result of the increasing acceptance of this "new" medium.


Funny, but the most memorable Christmas present of my childhood was a bicycle, not a book. In my family, books were so much a part of life that I don't associate them with any particular holiday. Books were simply there, all the time, in heaps. But that bicycle…

I can still remember my parents' chuckles as I failed to notice the massive, shiny red Schwinn leaning against the wall. Focused on the small stuff under the tree, I had no eye for anything so far beyond my expectations. Conspiratorial laughter broke my trance, and when I finally saw the Big Present, my thrill was tinged with humiliation, which no doubt accounts for the memory’s indelibility. It was my first awareness of looking without seeing, of the cognitive constriction that comes with age.

The same perceptual narrowness explains why a parent in those days would never give a child a comic book. To grownups, comics were cheap and cheesy, things to be confiscated, never bestowed. My parents at least tolerated my accumulation of Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Little Lulu, and Classics Illustrated, but they surely failed to see them as part of a rich and cherished medium. Buying one was emphatically not an adult activity.

The publishing industry felt the same way. When I first proposed The Cartoon History of the Universe to a certain New York publishing house in the late 1980s, a friendly editor had to force her blindly skeptical marketing department to review it twice before giving it a grudging nod. The book sold well; a few other daring companies had similar conceptual breakthroughs; more successes from other authors followed; and mainstream publishing embraced a new medium.

“Graphic novels,” or fat comic books as they ought to be called, made comics respectable, or at least not completely disreputable. My recent holiday memories are sweet and acute: Alison Bechdel’s FUN HOME, Craig Thompson’s BLANKETS, Marjane Satrapi’s PERSOPOLIS, Quino’s MAFALDA --- a book the size of a small refrigerator that makes you laugh, teaches you Spanish, and builds your triceps all at the same time --- and this year (it came early and I read it --- sorry) Doxiadis’ and Papadimitriou’s spectacular LOGICOMIX. And because comics are the one medium besides music that we return to again and again and again, my reading pleasure has multiplied many times in recent years.

A mind is a wonderful thing to open.

-- Larry Gonick


This afternoon, Steve Luxenberg discusses a Christmas tradition his Hanukkah-celebrating family has taken part in for nearly two decades.

Labels: From the Bastille to Baghdad, holiday-blogs-2009, Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Modern World

While books have always been a staple under the Christmas tree, Marcia Muller --- author of the Sharon McCone series, including its most recent installment, LOCKED IN --- reveals how she found one of the greatest presents she'd ever received at her front step instead of inside her holiday stocking, many years ago.


Books were always under the tree on Christmas morning at my house. My parents were fond of them, and they instilled that love of reading in all of us. My earliest memory of those holiday treasures are the Golden Books slender volumes with filigreed spines. And then the Babar the Elephant books; I must have read BABAR AND ZEPHYR a hundred times! In third grade, I was gifted with Felix Salton’s BAMBI’S CHILDREN because I’d worn out the copy in the school library. THE SECRET OF BARNEGAT LIGHT, a mystery centered around the lighthouse at the north end of Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where we spent our summers, was a big hit --- my first book inscribed by the author, Frances McGuire. Then followed the Judy Boltons and Nancy Drews --- foundations for the adult novels I would one day write.

GONE WITH THE WIND was under the tree when I was I high school, the first “grown up” book I was encouraged to read (although for years I’d been pilfering far racier stuff from my parents’ library). I regret to say I was never gifted with PEYTON PLACE; that I had to read over the course of several sweltering summer days in the attic, where my mom had hidden it spine inward on a dusty shelf.

Years later, in December of 1977, a package arrived at my San Francisco home. Inside nestled a slim volume with a Victorian facade on its dust jacket: EDWIN OF THE IRON SHOES, my first published novel.

That was the best Christmas gift of all!

-- Marcia Muller


Check back tomorrow, as Larry Gonick and Steve Luxenberg join us with their holiday traditions and musings on reading preferences.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Locked in, Marcia Muller

Jason Pinter --- whose latest book, THE DARKNESS, just hit stores this month --- can trace his love of stories all the way back to a picture book from his childhood about an immature tugboat afraid of the high seas. Below, he reminisces about being given a brand new copy many years later, on a very special day.


The very first book I ever received for the holidays was Hardy Gramatky’s classic children’s tale LITTLE TOOT. My father gave it to me for Hanukkah when I was just an infant, but it quickly became my favorite book, which I forced him to read to me dozens and dozens of times as a child. I fell in love with this tale of a young, immature tugboat who prefers making figure 8’s in the water rather than doing his job of pulling out massive ocean liners. When Little Toot is exiled by the other tugboats for his childish behavior, he learns to overcome his immaturity and fears of the high seas by rescuing a trapped ocean liner. LITTLE TOOT was a stirring adventure for my young mind, and it was the beginning of my lifelong love of stories.

Over the years, my love of reading was greatly influenced by my father. We lived near a wonderful mystery bookstore called The Black Orchid. Every few weeks my father would come home with a bagful of new books, recommended by the store’s kind owners, Bonnie and Joe (who have since become friends of mine). Once he finished those books, they were passed to my eager hands. I inhaled them, gulping down stories like candy. Those bags of books inspired my love of crime novels, and it’s safe to say I would not have written my own without them.

A little over three years ago, I married my college sweetheart. Just prior to the wedding ceremony, my father gave me a thin package, wrapped in wrapping paper that suspiciously resembled a book. (Having received innumerable books as over the years for presents, I’ve become an expert at identifying them through wrapping paper). When I opened this package, however, I was surprised and overjoyed to see a brand new copy of LITTLE TOOT. My father had inscribed it to me, stating how he remembered reading it to me as a child, and how proud he was to see that small boy grow up to become a man. He felt that because books had become such a big part of my life, on such an important day I should have a new copy of the book that started it all. As LITTLE TOOT was an important story from my childhood, having those memories come flooding back to me was an even more important part of my wedding day. My whole life I have loved stories, loved books, loved tales of heroism and courage. And it likely would not have happened without the help from one small, heroic little tugboat named Little Toot.

-- Jason Pinter


Later this afternoon, Marsha Muller shares some of the favorite books she'd received over the years, which have helped pave the way for her own career as an author.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Jason Pinter, The Darkness

Lisa Grunberger, author of YIDDISH YOGA, shares her bookish holiday memories through the voice of Ruthie, the septuagenarian protagonist of her debut novel, who reminisces about one of the first Chanukahs spent with her late husband, Harry.

The heroine of my first book, YIDDISH YOGA: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss, and the Lotus Position, is a 72-year-old Jewish grandmother living in New York. Ruthie, recently widowed, receives a year of yoga lessons as a gift from her granddaughter, to help her work through her grief.

Although she tweets regularly, her blog has been quiet lately, so I asked her to share with you a holiday memory about books, in time for Chanukah.


It is said that the Jewish people are “people of the Book.” To my Harry, my beloved husband, I owe an understanding of what this means, because of his gift to me of one book, THE JOYS OF YIDDISH, by Leo Rosten. This is a humorous collection of popular Yiddish words, each illustrated by a joke.

One Chanukah early in our marriage, we visited my parents, who spoke Yiddish at home. Momma put out a plate of golden potato pancakes with apple sauce and sour cream and a plate of hot suvganiyot, fried doughnuts dusted with confectioner’s sugar filled with apricot preserves.

“Harry, why don’t you read to us from THE JOYS OF YIDDISH?” I asked him.

I wanted Momma and Poppa to see how funny Harry was. How heimish, which means homey, like family. Harry picked up the book, and I could tell he was nervous, for he was perspiring. It was hot in my parents’ New York apartment --- no matter how much you tried, you couldn’t adjust the heat. He turned to a random page.

“Chozzerai: pronounced kho-zair-eye to rhyme with ‘roz her eye.’” He read the definition, “A Yiddish derivation from the Hebrew “khazir,” pig.
1. Food that is awful. ‘Who can eat such chozzerai?’
2. Junk, trash.
3. Anything disgusting.

“In modern terms, chozzerai means crap. This may be a gross libel on the innocent pig since the pig, contrary to popular belief, is a quite tidy creature; he wallows in mud because he likes to stay cool.”

“So Harry,” Momma interrupted. “You think I serve you chozzerai? You eat pig? You feed my daughter meat that is not kosher? You don’t like my baking? You think we’re not fancy enough?”

Harry composed himself. “Mrs. Greenberg, Jewish tradition tells us that Elijah, the perpetually journeying prophet, appears in many unexpected guises in order to help people recover the spark of their lives. Books that we love are our lights, which help us dedicate and re-dedicate ourselves, which is the meaning of Chanukah, for the temple was rededicated.” He took a quick breath. “I am a lawyer, and I love words and books, and culture and Yiddish and Hebrew. . . and your daughter, Ruthie. She is my light, my book, my miracle. I dedicate my life to hers, we are building a Jewish life, a Jewish home together. And by the way, these are the most delicious sufganiyot I’ve ever tasted. A real mekhaye, a real joy.”

My Mother looked at the table full of food, the Chanukah candles burning in the living room, my father half asleep in the leather armchair, the Jewish Forward in his lap. Tears poured from her eyes as she approached Harry, and gave him many kisses and hugs. “You speak Yiddish, a learned man, a modern man, a mensch with golden words, words he makes dance. My son, my son, may you be happy together, with pigs, without pigs, with books, with children, with each other’s light.”

Each Chanukah after that one, we made a tradition of remembering Momma’s blessing and reading from THE JOYS OF YIDDISH. And it’s such a funny book, we kept a box of Kleenex beside us because we all laughed so hard we’d cry.

Now I bring in THE JOYS OF YIDDISH to my yoga classes and read to my fellow students some of the strange sounding words and phrases. It makes them laugh, and Harry and Momma agreed this is the most pleasing sound to God. I have often said that I dedicate my yoga practice to my Harry. It’s like lighting a yahrzeit candle for him daily. My body is the dancing flame that continues to burn for him.

I hope you enjoyed this memory from Ruthie, and get to read about her introduction to the world of yoga in my book, and share the laughter as she stretches and kvetches her way through making a new path for herself.

-- Lisa Grunberger


Join us again tomorrow, as Jason Pinter describes how a little tugboat named Little Toot inspired his lifelong love of stories.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Lisa Grunberger, Yiddish Yoga

Betsy Carter, author of THE PUZZLE KING, muses on the reciprocal value of literature as she she describes finding a treasured copy of an old classic to present to her spouse on Christmas Day.


I’d heard about the book before I ever met it. It was one of the first stories he’d ever told me about himself: the trip to the Catskills with his sister and brother-in-law. How he’d found the book on a shelf by the fireplace and how, to his 12-year-old mind, the orange leather binding and beautiful hand-colored plates seemed like a treasure. And that was before he’d even read the thing. It was the book that drew him into the world of animals and cemented his belief that they were as complicated and communicative as we are. He must have read this book more than a hundred times, he said, and each time he discovered something new.

I met the book during our first summer together when we went on a misguided trip to Sedona. It was north of 120 degrees on some days --- too hot for even airplanes to land or take off. So our vacation was mostly early mornings and late afternoons, ducking into museums or bookstores wherever we could find them. On one of those forays, I found a well air-conditioned antique store. He opted for a Starbucks instead. I rummaged through the Victorian furniture and porcelain tea sets when my eye was drawn to a stack of moldy books. One of them had a slightly battered orange cover. There was a beautiful painting of Baloo the bear and Mowgli the wolf boy on the cover. The type was an elegant old serif and there were plates of colored pictures throughout. It had to be a copy of the one he’d had as a child. I bought the book, stuffed into my bag and never said anything about it until the following Christmas, when I wrapped it up and wrote a note saying that I had invited some old friends to come and visit. The present brought tears to his eyes and earned me a wad of merits in the sensitive fiance department.

Two months later, when I got a bad case of the flu, I finally got to know the book as he sat by my bedside and read me the stories: putting the pedal to his "s's" when speaking the python Kaa’s throaty words; making his syllables as full and round as trombone notes when he became Baloo the bear, and turning his voice alternately silky and menacing as the mighty black panther Bagheera. And when he was little Mowgli, he was as sweet and awestruck as a 12-year-old boy who discovers that animals can talk.

He still says that copy of THE JUNGLE BOOK was the best Christmas gift I ever gave him, but I say his way of introducing its characters to me was the best present anyone ever gave me.

-- Betsy Carter


This afternoon, Lisa Grunberger's 72-year-old protagonist, Ruthie, discusses sharing a favorite copy of THE JOYS OF YIDDISH with her share with her classmates at yoga class.

Labels: Betsy Carter, holiday-blogs-2009, The Puzzle King

Kristin Hannah --- author of MAGIC HOUR, FIREFLY LANE and TRUE COLORS --- recalls how a thoughtful Christmas gift and a nasty case of the flu introduced her to what has since become of her favorite and most important book she's ever read.


When asked to write about my memorable holiday reading experiences, the difficulty lies in choosing. I was lucky to be born into a family of readers. I started my journey of words as most children do, curled in my mother’s lap, listening to her beautiful voice and looking at pictures as she turned the pages. Every Christmas Eve, we were allowed to open one present --- always a book --- and we raced upstairs in our pajamas to read by lamplight as we listened for Santa’s sleigh. It wasn’t until I was a mother myself that I realized the true genius of this tradition: we kids stayed up late into the night…and slept in just a little bit later on Christmas morning.

Obviously, I have a string of books that mattered to me, that changed the way I saw the world. Early on, there were the Oz books by Frank L. Baum, and CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. These were novels that helped me grow up, showed me that the world could sometimes be a scary and unexpected place. I felt very grown up when I read them, and if I often ran up to Mom in the kitchen afterward and stayed close, she never seemed to mind. Or perhaps she knew that that’s what books are all about --- they take us places and show us things and even terrify us, but we are stronger for it in the end.

But even with all of that, when asked to choose a most important childhood book, the answer is ultimately easy; I can do it without even thinking about it: The Lord of the Rings. When I was 13 years old --- in 1973, the “make love not war” years --- these fantasy novels were the talk of my household. My parents tried repeatedly to get me to read the trilogy. Because I was a teenager, I refused on principle alone. Several times, I attempted to read the first one, but I always put it down. Too many words, I’d say. Too confusing, too slow. And my mother would smile.

Then I got the whole hardcover set for Christmas, and on the next day, I came down with the flu. Well, without school to go to or friends to visit, I started THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, and that was it. Fever? Who cares. Hacking cough? Hardly noticed. I walked into Middle Earth and was never quite the same again. I fell in love with Gandalf and Frodo and Aragorn and Sam (him especially). It was the sheer heroism of the hobbits that slayed me. The friendship and the courage.

I couldn’t wait to share these novels with my son. When he was about 13, I handed him the first one and told him he had to read it. He refused, of course (him being the teenager now), and I understood. One Christmas, I gave him his own hardcover set of the novels, and I inscribed them with the same words my mother had once written to me.

I knew that sooner or later, he’d open that first volume and try again. I knew that when the time was right --- maybe on the quiet day after Christmas --- Tolkien would whisper to him in that magical voice, and my son would be as lost as I was. And that is exactly what happened.

When I saw him reading, I knew that somewhere, my mother was smiling…

-- Kristin Hannah


Tomorrow, Betsy Carter describes finding the perfect the perfect gift for a loved one --- an antique copy of THE JUNGLE BOOK.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Kristin Hannah, True Colors

In this touching piece about a surprising and meaningful gift from her husband, Amy Bloom --- author of AWAY and whose latest collection of short stories, WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT, hits stores next month --- illustrates how the books people enjoy can often act as reflections of their character.

Amy's new book won't be available in stores until January 11th, but you can download a sample story at a low price from Amazon.com here.

When I was a child, printed matter flowed into my house like water: magazines, three newspapers a day, library books by the wagonload (I had a little red wagon and trundled it through the library once a week), my father's crazy journals of the paranormal (in which everything had a greenish glow and levitated), and his stacks of Playboy magazines, which sat right next to the aliens from outer space and gave me even more to think about. The books themselves were gifts (LITTLE WOMEN, MY ANTONIA, A TALE OF TWO CITIES) but if anyone ever gave me one --- and I’m sure my parents did --- I don't remember.

My only true Christmas book-gift came a few years ago. I had fallen in love, embarrassingly late in life, embarrassingly fast, and he and I were standing in a bookstore, buying gifts for everyone in our Chrismukkah continuum. We had talked out our differences, which were so numerous, it was amazing we'd ever crossed paths, let alone fallen in love --- but we knew, the way you know that the baby's coming, or that the ship has sailed, that we would marry. I handed him a book of Jane Kenyon's poems and he read a few, charmed and moved. A good sign, I thought. He picked up THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA, flipped through a few pages, and began to read. He put his packages down. He sat down on the floor. I had never said, “She is my absolute favorite poet, if I must choose among all the poets I love and admire.” He sat there, big handsome man, tears streaming down his face while reading my favorite of favorites, "Allegro ma non troppo," which begins, “Life, you're beautiful, (I say)…” Szymborska creates such a realistic, compassionate world of love and life and loss held by her witty way with language that it squeezes my heart every time. He read, there in the store, for a half hour.

He gave it to me at Christmas Eve, when we have Seven Fishes and fill stockings, and we got married in September and the book is on my nightstand still.

-- Amy Bloom


This evening, Kristin Hannah joins us with a recollection of a favorite book from childhood, and the joy she felt in passing it on to her young son.

Labels: Amy Bloom, holiday-blogs-2009, Where the God of Love Hangs Out

Having grown up celebrating Hanukkah, Sally Koslow --- author of LITTLE PINK SLIPS and THE LATE, LAMENTED MOLLY MARX --- shares her favorite pastime for December 24th and 25th, and explains how she came to celebrate, and eventually write about, the Christmas season.


In my hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, there was no crossing of fingers, hoping it might be a white Christmas. It would, you betcha, just as surely as it would be a white Valentine’s Day and quite possibly a white Passover and Easter. A blizzard, to us, wasn’t from Dairy Queen --- it was a gift from God , who’d cancelled school.

In the north country, Christmas was --- no surprise --- done up big, with decorations at virtually every house. Make that every house but ours because, despite the towering Rockefeller Center-worthy blue spruce outside our door, we celebrated Hanukkah and thus did not deck either it or our halls with boughs of holly or the homemade popcorn strands that I read about in my children’s books. I got my red and green jollies beyond my front door. This meant caroling with friends --- I promise you, I can sing every verse of "O Come All Ye Faithful" --- after which we’d hit the skating rink under a starry, black velvet sky.

All in all, I found this an agreeable arrangement, and it went on for most of December, along with hot-and-cold running school pageants. But in my home, Christmas Eve and December 25th were actually very, very quiet. This made them excellent days to read, an activity that I vastly preferred to either skating or caroling.

The first book I recall loving enough to devour again and again was THE SECRET GARDEN, sent to me by my very literate (think The Atlantic magazine on the nightstand) Nana. Mary Lennox, Martha Sowerby, her brother Dickon, and, of course, Colin, became my best friends. This classic paved the way for LITTLE WOMEN, a present from my mom, another avid reader, who like Marmie, always gave books for the holidays. Like every girl who dreamt of becoming a writer, I saw myself in Jo, the feisty bookworm.

Soon my Hanukkah gifts included REBECCA, JANE EYRE and eventually, the Jane Austen trifecta --- PRIDE AND PREDJUDICE, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, AND EMMA --- along with THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK and Leon Uris’s bestseller MILA 18. But I’m fairly sure it was a tattered copy of Herman Wouk’s MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR, discovered on our bookshelf, which was my inspiration for moving to New York. I arrived there after college graduation, settled in near Central Park West where Marjorie lived and landed a job at iconic Mademoiselle magazine. This led to writing and editing at other magazines, culminating as editor-in-chief of both McCall’s and Lifetime, which I started. And this leads me back to Christmas.

If you wonder who visits over-the top magazine Christmas fantasies upon the women of America, it’s people like me, who picture the holiday as much from their dreams as their memories. Since a December issue gets sent to the printer in September, we spend the better part of our summer developing ideas for “d.i.y.” (do it yourself) ornaments, daunting gift wraps, and 12-step cookies, which we run next to articles on how not to get stressed by the holidays. Good luck with that.

Now my life has come full circle. I no longer edit magazines because, inspired by my early reading, I’m writing novels. LITTLE PINK SLIPS, my first book, is set at a McCall’s-ish magazine and recounts how Christmas is celebrated in that industry --- with plenty of swag, and I’m not talking cranberry garlands. My most recent novel, THE LATE, LAMENTED MOLLY MARX, has a heroine who lives not far from the mythical Marjorie Morningstar. In
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE, coming out next summer, Marjorie’s building has a featured role.

When you write fiction, your whole life is material. Tonight, I’m off for my annual walkabout to take in Manhattan’s Christmas windows. If my fourth novel features one of the opulent dioramas of Bergdorf’s or arch displays at Barney’s, do not be surprised.

-- Sally Koslow


Tomorrow, Amy Bloom and Kristin Hannah discuss meaningful reads shared between loved ones.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Lamented Molly Marx, Sally Koslow, The Late

Laura Kasischke, author of THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES and IN A PERFECT WORLD, reminisces about a particular holiday present she'd received as a child that stood out far amongst the heaps of toys she'd been given.


I was an only child in an extended family short on kids, the only niece among many aunts, great aunts, and even a few doting bachelor uncles. You can imagine the Christmas presents, I suppose. There were heaps of them beneath the tree: all manner of talking, walking, wetting, singing dolls. My Barbies had the kinds of wardrobes other girls' Barbies would have ripped my Barbies' eyeballs out for. My Kens had sportscars. My stuffed animals had combs and brushes, rhinestone collars and their own settees.

We weren't rich --- I feel the need to emphasize this before all you middle children from enormous families hate me even more than you already do --- but I was spoiled. I'll admit it. Wildly spoiled. If it hadn't been for a few hard knocks, I'd still probably be thinking that the Christmas season had been invented so that elderly relatives could have the pleasure of coming over and watching me unwrap my presents in the morning.

Where are those presents now?

Well, after those few brilliant Christmases spent together in this world, before old age and illness took my relatives and adulthood's hundred relocations scattered all of my childhood things, the best present I ever got resides inside me:

It is the sweet, sad, beautiful narrative of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which came to me first in a nine-box set of pulpy, simple, sturdy books.

Let me honest and tell you that, along with all the toys, those books have long since slipped away from me in a material sense. But by the time they were lost (or had moldered to ruin in a leaky basement or been sold at a garage sale) I didn't need them any longer. The Big Woods, the Prairie, the Shores of Silver Lake, the Banks of Plum Creek, and the people who lived and loved and suffered there through their exciting moments and their homely moments had taken up residence in me forever. Since the Christmas morning I was blessed with that gift, I have carried those places and those people with me everywhere I've ever gone --- along with that voice, and even the smell of those pages and the bright, inviting covers of those books and the smart box they slid into so satisfyingly.

And it's why I never have to think twice about what will make the best and most memorable gift for even the most spoiled child in my life. I know that after he or she rips off the packaging (maybe just a tad sorry that it's not the latest electronic device) to find a book, I know the gift is still yet to be opened. The gift will be inside the book.

-- Laura Kasischke


Later this afternoon, Sally Koslow shares her favorite Christmas Day activity.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, In a Perfect World, Laura Kasischke

Lauren Grodstein, author of A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY, describes the thrilling experience of receiving her first "grown-up book" for Hannukah one year, knowing --- even at the age of ten --- that it was one of the best presents she could possibly receive.


Hannukah gifts in the neighborhood where I grew up ranged from the merely elaborate to the cruelly baroque. I remember friends bragging about the four-story dollhouses Hannukah Harry left under the menorah, the bichon frises and the color televisions and the trips to Aruba. In my house, however, the eight nights of Hanukkah were more sedate: latkes and dreidels, songs and candles, and, after dinner, a single, compact, pleasant but restrained present. For me, that present was almost always a book.

Now, it’s not like I didn’t wish for a bichon frise of my very own, but in truth I loved my eight nights of books. My mom (and I knew it was my mom --- there was no Hannukah Harry crap in the Grodstein house) had a way of picking out something I would never have thought to pick for myself but was always precisely what I wanted. She bought me Lois Lowry’s Anastasia books and Paul Zindel’s THE PIGMAN, Ellen Raskin’s THE WESTING GAME, and John Bellairs’s THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS. But the book I remember enjoying the most was EIGHT MEN OUT by Eliot Asinof, which I got for the first night of my tenth Hannukah, and which took me longer to read than any book I’d previously encountered.

Now, it might seem odd that a book about the Chicago White Sox scandal of 1919 would speak so loudly to a 10 year old in New Jersey in 1986, but I was learning to love baseball at the time --- our house team, the New York Mets, had just won the World Series --- and so everything about baseball seemed crucial to me then. Further, the character of Shoeless Joe Jackson appealed to me the same way Mets left-fielder Darryl Strawberry did --- they were both power hitters with the ability to change the direction of any single game, or even an entire season. But still, EIGHT MEN OUT was about a scandal as much as it was a sport, and it involved all sorts of laws I didn’t quite understand, and people with crazy names like “Kenesaw Mountain Landis.” Reading it, I needed to use a dictionary --- a lot. And I needed to ask my dad a lot of questions.

And this, I suppose, was what I loved most of all about the book: it was the first book anyone ever gave me that treated me like a grown up. It was an adult nonfiction book, about an adult, nonfiction topic, but my mom didn’t give it to me because she had an agenda or because I told her I was up to the challenge. She gave it to me because she thought I’d like it. I did like it. I carried it with me everywhere, and when one fifth-grade classmate brought her new golden hairclips to school, studded with --- I’m not kidding --- real tiny diamonds and pearls, I thought about the book in my bag, the weight of it, its total lack of illustrations. I remember thinking about how I was officially a grown-up now, because I was reading grown-up books. I remember thinking that the library was suddenly a much bigger place. And I remember regarding the hairclips and feeling glad that this time, I’d gotten what was, unmistakably, the better gift.

-- Lauren Grodstein


Check back tomorrow, as Laura Kasischke and Sally Koslow list some of their favorite and most memorable holiday reads.

Labels: A Friend of the Family, holiday-blogs-2009, Lauren Grodstein

Heather Gudenkauf --- author of THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE --- thinks back to one holiday from her childhood, when she learned a valuable lesson from a hasty decision and the help of a favorite book.


The holiday season was always a wonderfully chaotic time in my childhood home. With six children, two adults, a dog, a finch, two gerbils, and several hermit crabs all living under one roof, we had our share of adventures and misadventures. But unmistakably, we always had each other.

One of the most wonderful gifts I received the Christmas I was nine wasn’t from Santa Claus, but from my mom and dad. I could tell by its shape and heft that inside was a box of books. Books were highly valued in our home, but being the youngest of six, I rarely had a brand new, unmarred book of my own. I always received the chocolate-smeared, doodled-on books they didn’t want anymore. On Christmas Eve, with anticipation, I tore into the package and found a box set of Beverly Cleary books including one of my all-time favorites, RAMONA AND HER FATHER. Growing up, I wanted to be Ramona Quimby. I loved her sassiness, I loved her wonderful imagination, and I loved all the predicaments she got herself into and out of. Unfortunately, my personality was more akin to Ramona’s mild-mannered, best friend Howie than to Ramona’s free-spiritedness. While the snow swirled and the wind blew, I spent the remainder of my holiday break ensconced in my toy box, wrapped in a sleeping bag, holding a flashlight and reading my Beverly Cleary books. In RAMONA AND HER FATHER, Ramona managed to get a crown of burs stuck on her head, accused her teacher of having wrinkly elephant ankles, and called the elderly neighbor lady pie face. But in that same book Ramona also managed to convince her father to quit smoking, taught the reader how to make tin can stilts, was the best lamb in the Christmas play even though her costume was made up of old pajamas with faded bunnies on them, and taught me the lesson that family is what is most important.

In a matter of days, I had finished reading my books. Even at the age of nine, I was always on the search for something new to read, so I braved the cold and walked to a local used book store where I could trade my books in for credit toward more books. As I handed over my box of Beverly Cleary novels that my parents had just given me for Christmas, I knew I was doing the wrong thing, but that didn’t stop me. As I went to bed that night, my new books piled by my bedside, I found no joy in the adventures within their pages. I knew how hard my parents worked, I knew how carefully they picked out those books for me, but still I had given them away with little thought. And for what? A few used books, which on closer inspection, had stained pages that smelled liked mildew. I couldn’t sleep that night knowing that my actions hurt my parents’ feelings. The next morning, still feeling guilty, I asked my sister what I should do. “Go back and get them,” she told me simply. And not for the first time, and certainly not the last, I understood the wisdom in my sister’s advice.

I dug into my earnings from shoveling snow and tromped back to the bookstore. After a few frantic moments scanning the shelves in hopes of finding my box of books, I saw them, still within their case, still shiny and new looking. I paid for my books and brought them home with me, where they belonged. Now that was just the thing Ramona Quimby would have done.

I still have that copy of RAMONA AND HER FATHER. The pages are stained and smell a little like mildew, but no matter, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I have shared my love for Ramona and the other characters that live on Beverly Cleary’s Klickitat Street with my own children. We have laughed over Ramona’s feistiness, groaned over the dilemmas she gets herself into, and pondered over the lesson that Ramona always manages to teach us… that family is the gift to be valued most.

-- Heather Gudenkauf


Tomorrow, Lauren Grodstein joins us on the first day of Hanukkah with memories of eight nights of books.

Labels: Heather Gudenkauf, holiday-blogs-2009, The Weight of Silence

Gesine Bullock-Prado --- owner of Gesine Confectionary in Montpelier VT, and author of the memoir, CONFECTIONS OF A CLOSET MASTER BAKER --- shares memories of the extraordinary Christmases of her childhood, and the very special person responsible for bringing such joy to the holidays.

My mother, I’m convinced to this day, was part elf, imbued by the holiday spirits with the gift of conjuring joy from the seasons. She was German, a woman from the old world, where fairy tales were most often gruesome and fraught with danger but never without boatloads of magic. Even St. Nick --- he was a menacing wraith and not the jolly Saint we know, love, and never fear Stateside. But my mother, she harnessed these elements from her homeland, the scary Santa and the uncensored and bloody Grimm’s tales, and dressed them in fairy dust and celebration.

On December 6th, she pulled all the stops. It’s on this day that Santa comes, not on the 25th. And not only does he come early, he brings a ghoulish friend named Krampus. If you thought a scrawny, red velvet robe-wearing, scrappy bearded saint was scary, wait until you catch sight of his hell-hound helper. He’s one stinky demon, that guy. In many a German household, the matriarchs and patriarchs will enlist some poor schlubs to visit their homes on the 6th dressed as the aforementioned St. Nikolaus and Krampus and scare the hell out of their children. I’ve witnessed it firsthand, both as a child and as an adult.

As a matter of fact, I took my husband Ray to a small hamlet called Traunreuth in the deepest reaches of Bavaria so that he might partake in the fear fest that is St. Nikolaustag. We sat and watched as my cousin invited the dank twosome into her home, her gaggle of children waiting in horror. Each child was made to approach the Yuletide Freddie Kruger and atone for their myriad sins of the past year and maybe, just maybe, get a sack of treats in return. You see, St. Nikolaus brought with him a ledger and there was an accounting for each child’s actions written upon it. “Barbara! On August 16th of this year you promised to make your bed. Yet you left the house to play with your bed still a mess! What do you have to say for yourself!?!?!?!?” You can imagine that for a good week after this kind of intervention, German children everywhere keep their rooms spotless. Ray was suitably horrified.

But my mother, she kept the magic of the moment and took out the terror. She’d never go so far as to enlist a carny to dress in Santa’s rags and scare the bejeezus out of us. Instead, she gave us hints of the bearded one’s presence, exclaiming on cue at 7pm on the 6th that she might have heard something peculiar outside and shouldn’t we go take a look? Lo and behold, a flash of red cloak would round the corner of the house, and before we could take flight and catch whomever the creature was, we’d stop short just outside the door’s threshold in awe. There would be two glorious red stockings overflowing with a sweet bounty that would keep any kid glued in place.

To this day, I’ve never figured out how she stage-directed all her holiday surprises so beautifully. On Easter, the baskets jam-packed with German sweet delicacies would find themselves precariously perched atop the highest tree limb in the back yard. On Christmas Eve, we come home from a last-minute shopping jag to find a Christmas tree miraculously standing in the living room, festooned with small candles and brimming with hand-carved wooden ornaments where just a few hours before, there had been nothing.

These days, it appears that ‘tis the season primarily for presents and material things. But no matter the hoopla around Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all that stuff we end up taking home and in debt over, it’s the moments of pure delight and innocent wonder that make this time of year singularly revered. So to all of you elves out there who eschew the easy route of using your credit card to make the season bright and instead take it upon yourselves to
cultivate divine moments for those you love, I say thank you because like my mother, you’re one of those rare magic creatures that make the holiday season truly joyful.

-- Gesine Prado Bullock


Later this afternoon, Heather Gudenkauf thinks back to some treasured childhood possessions and how close she came to losing them after a rash decision.

Labels: Confections of a Master Baker, Gesine Bullock-Prado, holiday-blogs-2009

Melissa Mayhue, author of A HIGHLANDER'S DESTINY, revisits a particularly bleak holiday made memorable by a mother's big-hearted gift.


I’ve been an avid reader from the time I picked up my first book as a child. With no brothers or sisters to distract me, I spent untold hours of my childhood wandering the fantasy worlds books provided, living vicarious adventures through the eyes of any number of characters. Many of my best memories from childhood revolve around books, but one particular Christmas memory stands out from all the rest.

My parents couldn’t afford to buy me many books, but my mother took me to the library every Friday, regular as clockwork, and I delighted in reading my way through the children’s and young adults’ sections. I had a big bookcase in my room --- a monstrously ugly orange thing with four shelves. My all-time favorite Nancy Drew books (I had three that were my very own) occupied the top shelf, along with the current armload of books I’d brought home from the library. With all that empty space, my Barbie lived on three of those shelves, like some strange high-rise apartment affair.

My dad was a cement finisher and money was always a little tight in the winter, but this winter was worse than usual, following on the heels of a summer where there had been more bills than income. Everything was shaping up for a pretty bleak Christmas around my house. We’d gone out to the country and cut down a scraggly little Christmas tree that made the one the Peanuts gang decorated look pretty good.

Needless to say, my expectations for what would be under the tree for me that year were pretty low.

The morning of Christmas Eve, I rearranged my Barbie and her furniture, neatly placing every piece just so. I was hoping that my mom’s sewing machine sitting out on the kitchen table meant there would at the very least be a couple of new dresses to add to Barbie’s wardrobe under the tree for me tonight.

When it finally came time to unwrap gifts, I was amazed to find that, along with a couple of small packages, there was one big box with my name on it. To this day I can remember the feeling in the back of my throat as I ripped open that box and stared at its contents: books. Not just any books, but Nancy Drew Mysteries, the best books on the face of the planet. Twenty of them.

All that adventure, all that mystery, all that wonder. All mine.

Before bed that night, I evicted poor Barbie. Moved her to the bottom shelf, crowding her in with Ken and the off-brand dolls. That middle shelf, that prime eye-level space --- that belonged to Carolyn Keene’s masterpieces.

My mother had scoured every garage sale, every thrift store, every sale for months planning that gift for me. Of all the books I’ve ever been given, none will ever be as special as those.
All these years later, a neatly packed, well-sealed box of Nancy Drew Mysteries resides in my storage room, waiting for the possibility of granddaughters who will love Nancy as much as I did. I grew up to have sons, none of whom, to my great disappointment, liked Nancy Drew in the least! But that’s okay. I’ll never forget the hours spent with my favorite feisty sleuth --- just as I’ll never forget the Christmas I got a whole shelf-full of my favorite books for my very own.

-- Melissa Mayhue


Check back tomorrow, as Gesine Bullock-Prado discusses the magic touch her mother gave to all her childhood Christmases.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Melissa Mayhue, The Highlander's Destiny

Hallie Ephron, author of NEVER TELL A LIE and THE BIBLIOPHILE'S DEVOTIONAL, thinks back to her family's first holiday together, and the wonderful tradition they started with the help of two different customs and some really great books.


The December after my daughter Molly was born was the first year that my husband and I did not drive to New York to spend the holidays with family. I’d grown up with Christmas. My husband had grown up lighting Hanukkah candles. With a three-month-old baby, we stayed home in our rented apartment, the first floor of a two-family house, and started to figure out what our own traditions would be.

The day before Christmas, a package arrived addressed to Molly from my father. It was large --- about the size of a basketball --- and heavy. We’d decided to light candles, sing the blessings in Hebrew, and exchange small gifts each night of Hanukkah; but, that box from my dad was the gift that started another tradition: opening presents from my family on Christmas morning.

And what a gift it was. My father, a playwright and screenwriter, had gone to Books & Co., a cozy independent bookstore on Madison at 75th Street that closed in 1997. There, he’d picked out a treasure trove of books for our baby, his first grandchild, to grow into.

Though Molly was barely old enough to suck on the corner of a cover, she’d soon be patting the rabbit’s fur and slipping her finger into the ring hole in Dorothy Kunhardt’s PAT THE BUNNY, a book which I remembered reading to my baby sister, Amy. There were Beatrix Potter’s THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT and Ludwig Bemelmans’s MADELINE, books I knew by heart and which Molly, a few years later, would too. There was THE REAL MOTHER GOOSE, my favorite version with the checkerboard cover and illustrations of Blanche Fisher Wright. A compendium of wonderful illustrated Richard Scarry stories in RICHARD SCARRY’S BEST STORYBOOK EVER, which would be bedtime stories for years to come. An oversized, illustrated A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES. Several Oz books. And more.

I can name them all because when my daughters (we have two now) were grown and living on their own, they went through their books and picked out the ones they wanted to keep. All of Grandpa’s books from our first holiday as a family were keepers.

-- Hallie Ephron


Up next is Melissa Mayhue, who describes an unexpected holiday gift that exceeded all of her expectations.

Labels: Hallie Ephron, holiday-blogs-2009, Never Tell a Lie

Today's guest blogger, Stephen Coonts --- whose latest thriller, THE DISCIPLE, hits stores today --- muses on some of the simple joys of past Christmases, and reminds us of the best way to recapture the magic and wonder of the holiday season.

Please visit Stephen's newly redesigned website for a special treat!


Christmas is the premier holiday, although some men say their favorite holiday is the first day of deer season. For me, Christmas is shopping for presents, wrapping them, the anticipation of giving them, helping Deborah get the turkey into the oven on Christmas morning, aromas wafting from the kitchen, watching children tear open presents with squeals of delight, “Thank you’s” floating on the air, little treasures piling up at their feet, and convivial laughter around the dinner table. Christmas is the joy of being alive and in love with family, even when I was in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Christmas then was only letters from home, but ah, the emotions and memories that came with the letters!

Sometimes, on a rare occasion, we servicemen received more than letters. My eldest daughter, Rachael, was and is my favorite Christmas present. She was born on December 23, and I received the Red Cross notification on Christmas Day.

Other than daughters, books are my favorite present to give or receive. I try to pick just the perfect book for the avid readers on my list, and they try to do the same for me. I can recall Rachael, no more than six or seven, watching me open a book she chose for me and telling me why I would love it. And of course I did, because she knew I would.

My mother used to read to my brother and me at Christmas, and throughout the year, from THE CHILDREN’S ANTHOLOGY OF LITERATURE, a classic illustrated by Andrew Wyeth. I gave Mom’s copy to my children one Christmas many years ago, but somehow it was lost in the shuffles and vicissitudes of life. Several years ago, my brother and I scoured the internet for copies, which we hope to read to our grandchildren. When we do, we will both remember our mother reading to us while we huddled against her, one on each side, looking at Wyeth’s stupendous art.

Christmas is a time to renew your grasp on the magic and wonder of life. Open your heart this Christmas and let life shine in. And when everyone else is in bed, and you need to wind down a little before sleep, read a good book.

-- Stephen Coonts


Tomorrow, Hallie Ephron and Melissa Mayhue both discuss books worth holding onto.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Stephen Coonts, The Disciple

Though giving birth to her first child three days before Christmas is, without question, the best holiday present she's ever gotten, Meg Waite Clayton --- author of THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS --- describes her close second, which she finds as rewarding to give to others as it was for her to receive.


My favorite holiday gift ever --- one impossible to top --- was my oldest son, Christopher, born on December 22 (my father’s birthday!) 20 years ago, and brought home on Christmas day. There cannot be a lovelier way to leave a hospital than with a newborn in your arms and the sweet voices of nuns caroling in the halls behind you or a more welcoming way to arrive home than to find Christmas dinner --- complete with English trifle for dessert --- left on your front step. Well, I can neither give nor receive a child every holiday season, but my favorite gift to give ever since has been another one we received back then: the complete Beatrix Potter collection, 23 tiny hardcover books in a presentation box.

I knew the story of Peter Rabbit, of course, before I peeled the wrapping from this collection, but the most charming of Potter’s characters were new to me as well as to Chris: Jeremy Fisher with his mackintosh all in tatters; poor Tom Kitten, who narrowly escapes being the main ingredient of a “kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding;” Mrs. Tittlemouse and her friend Mr. Jackson, who says “Tiddly, widdly, widdly” and never wipes his feet.

The books, given to us by friends whose own children were already grown, would be irresistible just from their size --- each no bigger than an adult reader’s hand --- from the physical beauty of Miss Potter’s exquisitely done original water colors, and from the enticing sight of all those matched volumes lined up in their own portable shelf. But their greatest charm lies in the stories themselves, simple words strung together to bring funny characters and fantastic worlds alive and --- the real gift of this gift --- the way those stories lure you, even at the end of a long day, to pull a child to your lap and read to him or her, whether those children understand language yet or not.

Chris, now an economics and math major at the University of Chicago and a voracious reader and book collector, first learned the meaning of credit from Potter’s Ginger and Pickles, whose customers “come again and again, and buy quantities, in spite of being afraid of Ginger and Pickles,” and never do pay their bills. When his younger brother Nick joined us, the two of them would curl up together with Mac and me to listen and, later, to read themselves. When I see those books on our family room bookshelves even today, I see their little fingers choosing a volume for their bedtime stories. I hear them giggling in anticipation as Jemima Puddle-Duck collects sage and onions for “the sandy whiskered gentleman” fox who means to include her in his dinner in quite a different way than she expects. I remember them laughing in outright delight as Jeremy emerges from the trout’s mouth without his galoshes, exclaiming, “What a mercy that was not a pike!”

I couldn’t say how many times I’ve copycatted this particular gift over the 20 intervening years, but each time I do, I feel the joy of sharing them with my own sons, and of having friends who give gifts of books. To be honest, if they weren’t written by Beatrix Potter, I’d be quite sure my gift recipients couldn’t possibly get half the pleasure in receiving them that I get in the giving. But since they are Miss Potter’s stories, I know they’ll bring endless pleasure both to the children they are meant for and to the parents who will curl up with them and inspire the same lifetime love of reading my own sons received with this gift.

-- Meg Waite Clayton


Tomorrow, Stephen Coonts joins us to share some of his fondest holiday memories that he hopes to pass on to his grandchildren one day.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Meg Waite Clayton, The Wednesday Sisters

A RELIABLE WIFE author Robert Goolrick recalls an amazing encounter he had with legendary novelist Harper Lee, and the one truly priceless gift (if not two) he was able to give through a copy of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.


I give books, largely because I like shopping for books. I like wandering in bookstores, thinking about the varied interests of various friends, knowing that somewhere there is or has been someone who had the same interest and wrote about it with eloquence and grace: bee keeping, tulips, Betty Page.

My best book story isn’t a Christmas one, but I’ll tell it anyway. My friends David and Mimi were going to have a baby, and they were going to name it Harper whether it was a boy or a girl because Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a kind of Bible for southerners --- a reminder of the strangeness and beauty and cruelty and kindness of the region where we were born. Harper Lee’s book makes us cry like babies, no matter how many times we read it, and its eloquence never fades, which may explain why it is consistently named one of the best American novels of all time and has sold over 30 million copies.

So Harper was on the way, and I decided to give a signed first edition of the book to her as a baby gift. I was both poor and profligate and, even then, 30 years ago, first editions went for huge sums of money.

In those days, The Franklin Mint produced books, fine leather-bound editions of timeless American novels. The books were not expensive, and I ordered one and then I got obsessed with having it signed. But Harper Lee, among her other acts of grace and eloquence, had taken herself off the map. She existed only in rumor.

However, my brother worked for the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta, and I called on him, as an investigative reporter, to track her down, and he did, sort of. He found her sister, Alice, who still lived in the house she and her sister grew up in, in Monroeville, Alabama. I called her, and she couldn’t have been more charming. Nell, as she called her sister, wasn’t there, but she would be coming down any day now, and so I sent the book down there and waited.

Mimi’s belly grew bigger and bigger, and no book appeared. Then came the day. David called to say they were on their way to the hospital. I finished up, walked home, and there, in the mailbox, was an envelope from Monroeville.

Inside the envelope was my Franklin Mint book, and inside of it an inscription: “To Harper from Harper Lee, with all good wishes.” I raced up to the hospital and there was beautiful Mimi and handsome David, beaming at the face of their beautiful daughter, Harper.

I gave Mimi the book, and, when she unwrapped it, we all cried a little bit, because Harper was finally here, safe in her mother’s arms, and because someday that little girl would grow up and have the infinite pleasure of bursting into tears, as everybody does, when Scout finally meets Boo Radley for the first time.

Some years later, my friend Jeanne invited me to dinner at her mother’s house to meet some friends of her mother’s Alabama college days. And there was Harper Lee. Real. Living. Beautiful and tall and warm and such a perfect example of a woman of her kind, a kind you couldn’t even imagine the beauty of unless you yourself have actually met one. She was what my grandmother would call a lady.

She wasn’t weird in any way. She wasn’t anti-social, and she wasn’t drunk. She spent the evening telling stories about their days at college, about her father, Amasa, about a way of life that was as warm and comforting as grits on a cold winter day.

I told her the story about the book, about her namesake, and what a wonderful thing it was, but I got the feeling she didn’t remember it at all.

On the way home, I began to think that perhaps Harper Lee hadn’t actually signed the book. I began to think that Alice had signed her sister’s name, and, as much as I have tried to escape these misgivings, they stay with me.

I don’t think, or at least I hope, that it doesn’t matter. When you give a book, it’s not the object that matters, no matter how rare or exquisite. It is the experience, the giving of a passport into a whole new world, one which was imagined and made for you and only you to walk in, to inhabit, a country to call your own for the rest of your life. Home.

-- Robert Goolrick


More holiday cheer tomorrow as Meg Waite Clayton stops by to tell us about the best present she's ever received, two decades ago.

Labels: A Reliable Wife, holiday-blogs-2009, Robert Goolrick

Sometimes, all it takes to transport you to an entirely different time, place, and state of mind are a few lines from a favorite book. Mary Carter, author of SUNNYSIDE BLUES, shares with us one her particular favorites that never fails to conjure up the magical feeling of Christmas.


As I looked back on all my favorite books, I prayed one of them had been given to me as a Christmas gift, so I could whip up a brilliant holiday blog. I yearned for a rare, autographed copy of A CHRISTMAS CAROL discovered in the attic on Christmas Eve --- a warm and wise tome wrapped with love, whose between-the-pages-wisdom rescued an otherwise hopeless holiday. Or I wanted to write a second coming of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI --- impossible to read without falling to your knees and giving thanks for your own head of hair then looking sideways at your lover and thinking: And all you gave me was a triple-slotted toaster.

When I couldn’t think of any such memory, I was tempted to make something up. I am, after all, a novelist --- it’s in my nature. But then I realized Santa may be reading this, and I’ve promised not to be naughty. The truth is, if there was a book I wanted, by the time Christmas came, I’d probably already read it.

I come from a long line of readers, especially on my mother’s side. My grandmother was a librarian. My sister and I, in addition to being avid readers, are both writers as well. My mom loves books so much that when she and my father were married and people asked him, “What does your wife do?” he would answer: “You put her under a light and she reads.” Giving us books for Christmas would have been like giving us a glass of water. We were such fixtures at our local library that had we failed to show up one Saturday afternoon, they would have filed a Missing Persons Report.

There were items we coveted and saved all year round, only to bring out during the holidays. My mother’s Christmas china: plates, and tea cups, and saucers, made in Ireland; rimmed with gold, adorned with hand painted holly and bells, soon to be covered with juicy turkey, home-made mashed potatoes, and stuffing. My grandfather’s Lionel trains, snug in boxes all year round, would finally emerge to chug along their miniature metal tracks, and my sister and I would hover over it, waiting in pent-up glee for the sleek black engine to blow its whistle and shoot real smoke through its stacks. And of course, our stockings were hung, and we never, ever ate cranberry sauce at any other time of the year. But books? Books were as ubiquitous as our bathwater.

So instead, I will tell you about a book that, for me, captures the Christmas spirit. The story is magical, unpredictable, exciting. It sat on my Aunt Bessie’s shelf in Steubenville, Ohio. It was a hardback, with a black linen cover, the title embossed in gold. It was TIME AND AGAIN by Jack Finney. The minute I opened the pages and started reading, I fell into another world. In the following passage, Si Morley, a 20th-century illustrator, is living in an apartment in Manhattan overlooking Central Park. The United States Government has been conducting an experiment to see if they can send him back in time:

“Carrying my book, I walked to a window, and whatever it is that leaps in your chest with excitement sprang up now; there were six inches of new snow, unmarked and sparkling, on every horizontal surface outside, ten billion more fat flakes rushing past my window. Nothing moved on the street below me, and there wasn’t a parked car in sight, every one of them moved from the curbs before the snow trapped them. Under my window Central Park West was level with untouched snow, the traffic lights uselessly clicking from green to red, red to green, and across the street Central Park was a delight.”

That’s exactly how I want to feel on Christmas morning! Now, I live in that magical city depicted in the book. I am an author. And I believe in miracles --- because they live in the library down the street. They sit on your shelf or (gasp!) get downloaded to your Kindle, they await you in airports, they arrive in boxes at your front door, they sit in book stores across the country, they are given hand-to-hand by friends, and if you’re lucky, there might just be one under your tree. Here’s wishing you many good books this year, naughty or nice. And if you need an extra light to read by, ask Rudolph to lend you his nose. Ah, books: little bundles of Christmas joy. God Bless ‘em, every one.

-- Mary Carter


Later today, Robert Goolrick details a special (if dubious) gift from the writer of one of the greatest American novels ever written.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Mary Carter, Sunnyside Blues

Ad Hudler, author of SOUTHERN LIVING and MAN OF THE HOUSE, shares a story of a less-than-ideal living situation, and how a well-timed book on Christmas helped to set things right.


We had just moved from Florida to New York with a newborn in tow, and life was crazy. Because my wife had work and I did not, the responsibility of the move fell on me. And before I could go back to work, I had to find some in-home care, so I placed an ad in the newspaper and found Gloria. I wasn't crazy about her, but she was best of the lot: an expressive, Italian mother, who, I'd discover later, had a son in prison.

Our problem was this: Gloria refused to do as I said because I was a man, and, in her opinion, no man could tell her what to do with a house and baby. We fought and fought and fought. She rebelled by eating all my favorite foods from the refrigerator (we'd later discover she had had her stomach stapled). She refused to use a car seat with our daughter. And her idea of cleaning the house meant puffing up the throw pillows.

"Can't you deal with her?" I asked my wife. "She won't listen to me."

"Honey," my wife replied, "Gloria is your direct report. You're responsible for her."

"But I've never managed people before," I said. "I'm a writer. I don't know what I'm doing here."

Christmas came a month later. In my stocking was a book from my wife: THE ONE MINUTE MANAGER, by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnsons.

I read THE ONE MINUTE MANAGER in one hour, and, in one week, Gloria was gone.

-- Ad Hudler


Tomorrow, Mary Carter and Robert Goolrick discuss two rather memorable reads, and revel in the power of a well-told story.

Labels: Ad Hudler, holiday-blogs-2009, Southern Living

Kate Jacobs --- author of the bestselling FRIDAY NIGHT KNITTING CLUB, KNIT TWO, and the newly released holiday-themed KNIT THE SEASON --- reminisces about one of the one most beautiful presents she's ever received, one that was (almost) too precious to touch for many years.


My mother and I shared a favorite ritual when I was young of sitting in the family room after lunch to read. I should be clear: we read our own books, separately, silently, side by side on the couch (I thought this activity so fun that I often tried to convince my friends, over for a playdate, that we should play the “be quiet and read” game). My mother and I found all of our books on our regular expeditions to the town library, where we went once and sometimes twice a week. But in spite of our love of books, I owned just a few tattered Dr. Seusses and Barney Beagles (and my favorite, Sesame Street's ERNIE AND THE INVENTION OF PAPER). My mother had her own bookshelf of favorites in her bedroom, but rarely did she bring home something to add to it permanently. We were library girls and that was just fine.

And then, the Christmas when I was about seven, my cousin Mike and his parents gave me a gift that I’ll never forget: A hardback copy of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, its dust jacket a deep green, the printing small as in an adult book. There was even a laminated bookmark, complete with yarn tassel, resting inside. This was beyond exciting, the idea that no one else had ever touched, let alone read, this very copy. It was simply mine. Even the pages smelled magical, kind of fresh and woodsy. I did not put that book with the others, but placed it carefully on my display shelf, right next to my Strawberry Shortcake figurines, pushing it against the wall and using my clown piggy bank as a makeshift book end. I admired the book often. And yet it was years before I could bring myself to read that copy of ALICE, deeming it to be “too good,” instead signing out a copy from the library as usual. But that was all right, I decided, because I knew ALICE was just the first book of many I would grow to love, cherish, and, yes, to keep.

-- Kate Jacobs


Join us this afternoon as Ad Hudler learns a few tips on managing from a self-help book gifted by his wife.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Kate Jacobs, Knit the Season

Rosalind Noonan, co-author of SNOW ANGELS, fondly looks back on one Christmas, when her young daughter’s only holiday wish was to be able to grant someone else's.


You don’t spend half a century on Earth without acquiring a sleigh chock-full of Christmas memories, but when I sat down and thought about it, sorted through the caroling adventures, dramatic homecomings and sparkling toys, I realized that the fondest memories are those that warm the heart.

One Sunday in early December, my children noticed that a pine tree decorated with paper ornaments had been placed at the front of the church. Being huge fans of Christmas, they asked if we could take a closer look after the service, and we found that each paper ornament contained a name and a desired gift from their Christmas wish list. A woman from the church staff explained that the intended gifts were being collected for elderly and developmentally challenged people the church worked with.

My daughter, Carly, was fascinated by these paper “wishes.” At the time she had just learned to read, and she was intrigued by the secrets each ornament revealed. An elderly woman wanted a soft blanket in white or blue. A single parent was looking for age-appropriate blocks or games for their 18 month old. A woman of 23 asked for warm slippers, size 8. Some wish lists revealed other personal information like size, favorite color or hobby. Carly read every ornament within her reach, gobbling them up like candy.

I was still explaining how this gift fulfillment system worked to my five-year-old son when Carly showed me Bob’s ornament.

“Look at this, Mom. He likes basketball, too, and he needs a warm sweater. Can we get him one?”

According to the card, Bob was a male of undetermined age whose hobbies were basketball and watching TV. His desired item was a warm sweater, size extra-large.

“Each of you can get a gift,” I said. “Is this the one you want?

She nodded. “All these people want something, but Bob needs a sweater. I really want to find him something warm and comfy.”

We went shopping that afternoon, and the questions began: “Cardigan or pullover? Wool was warm, but would it be too itchy for Bob? Fleece okay?”

“I wish we could ask Bob,” Carly said as we decided against a wool and acrylic blend in a color that made my eyes water. One of the department stores was having a sale, but there wasn’t much variety in size XL, and Carly would not settle. When I showed her a stylish but thin sweater, she shook her head. “It needs to be warm,” she said, and we moved on.

When at last we found the right sweater --- a soft pullover in a blue and turquoise pattern --- Carly hugged it all the way to the register. “It’s so soft.” She smiled. “And it will keep Bob warm.”

Through her eyes, I could imagine Extra Large Bob opening his gift on Christmas morning. I could see him shrugging it on, rubbing the sleeves. I wondered if he would sense the philanthropic connection he’d stirred in my daughter. If only Bob could see the six-year-old girl smoothing the sweater on the counter, instilling love in it.

Years later, I like to think Bob felt the love, part of the magic of Christmas.

Good will toward men.

-- Rosalind Noonan


Check back tomorrow, as Ad Hudler recounts how getting one gift for Christmas led to an even better one, and Kate Jacobs describes a book that she felt was just too pretty to read (but only temporarily, of course).

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Rosalind Noonan, Snow Angels

Donna VanLiere --- author of the bestselling holiday tales THE CHRISTMAS SHOES, THE CHRISTMAS BLESSING and THE CHRISTMAS SECRET --- humorously recalls having to muddle through her young daughter's fear of spiders to introduce her to the cherished E.B. White tale, CHARLOTTE'S WEB, which has since become one of her favorite books.


Things change when you have children. I had always heard that but never really understood it until I had a few of my own of my own. A reporter recently asked me what my favorite part of Christmas was, and I said that it was seeing it through the eyes of my children. It sounds hokey to anyone who isn't a parent, I know, but Christmas is magical and mysterious and miracles abound when it is shared with a child.

We started reading books to our kids when they were just old enough to use the edge of the cover as a teething ring. Several books line our shelves with tiny teeth marks in them, but I’m convinced a love for reading starts at that young age. Each day before nap and bedtime, it became ritual for them to run to the shelves and pull out several books to read. My oldest is now eight and the ritual hasn’t changed. When the kids were infants, we started wrapping books for Christmas presents, and to my chagrin, none of them have ever opened one and said, “Wow! A new book! I can’t wait to read it!” but has rather simply tossed it aside for the new Barbie or the truck with the obnoxious horn. But, it’s the book that stands up to time while batteries die, and Barbie loses an arm to the dog, and her hair gets tangled and ratty.

When my daughter Gracie was three, we wrapped up CHARLOTTE’S WEB for her at Christmas. It had a bright red cover and a picture of Fern, Wilbur, and Charlotte on the front. She looked at it and said, “Does that pig talk?” I assured her he did. “Does the spider talk, too?” I was getting excited! I assured her that Charlotte most certainly talked. She threw it aside. “Then I don’t want to read it. I don’t like spiders.” I put the book on the shelves and gave her days --- okay, weeks --- to play with her new toys and forget about the spider comment. One afternoon at nap time, I announced that we’d be reading a brand new book. I pulled CHARLOTTE’S WEB off the shelf and held it aloft like a spokesmodel for a food processor: “Ta-da! Isn’t it great?!”
“I don’t want to read that,” Gracie said. “It has that spider in it that talks, and I don’t like spiders.” It had been weeks. How did she remember that?

“But it was one of your Christmas books, and it’s so sweet and funny with lots of animals and a little girl who saves a pig,” I said, using as many words I could think of that would capture the attention of a three year old. “And Charlotte isn’t scary. She’s Wilbur’s best friend.”

She was wary. Could I be trusted? “Does it happen at Christmas?” she asked.

My mind raced for any Christmas scenes. “I don’t remember exactly but let’s read and find out.”

Again, the look of concern. She got the book for Christmas, but it doesn’t take place on Christmas so that means there’s no gifts or candy or Santa anywhere in the story, and there’s that issue of the talking spider again.

“Okay,” she said. “But if it’s scary, I’m stopping my ears from listening.”

She snuggled on my lap, and I read with great flourish, even doing all the voices. I edited out the part of Fern’s dad wanting to kill the runt of the litter because I figured if a talking spider was scary, then whacking a pig would throw her off the edge completely! We read two chapters that day before naptime, and I knew Gracie was hooked. Days later when we finished the book, she asked me to read it again. We have since read it several times together.

Gracie recently went to the shelves and saw CHARLOTTE’S WEB. “Remember you gave that to me for Christmas that one year, and I didn’t want to read it because of Charlotte?” I laughed. It had been years! How in the world did she remember? Notice, she didn’t pick up one of the one-handed Barbie’s and remember it as a Christmas gift? That’s because books and the memory of reading them together last! Give out several this Christmas.

Happy reading!

-- Donna VanLiere


Later on, Rosalind Noonan shares her thoughts on the true meaning of Christmas and good will toward men.

Labels: Charlotte's Web, Donna VanLiere, holiday-blogs-2009

Below, Robert Hilburn --- author of CORNFLAKES WITH JOHN LENNON --- shares a tale of an unwanted gift, and how a mysterious baseball player changed his outlook on reading forever.


I wasn’t very happy the time one of my aunts sent me a book for Christmas rather than another passenger car for my new electric train set. I was in grade school in Los Angeles, and I didn’t have much interest in the book, even though there was a drawing of a baseball player on the cover. My reading matter leaned toward Plastic Man comic books or Mad Magazine. So I put the book in the closet.

Then one day a friend at school told me this great story about a pitcher on the Brooklyn Dodgers, Roy Tucker, who was so good he threw a no-hitter, only to hurt his arm and then battle his way back to the majors as a star slugger.

I was a big baseball fan and was surprised I hadn’t heard of this guy Tucker. I raced home and combed through my baseball bubble gum cards to see if I had a Roy Tucker card. When I couldn’t find him, I turned to my baseball history book but still, no Tucker.

I began to suspect that my friend had made up the whole story.

When I confronted him during recess the next day, he laughed. Tucker, he said, was a character in a book of fiction called THE KID FROM TOMKINSVILLE. He took me to the school library to show me the book by John R. Tunis, but it was checked out.

That evening I asked my mom to take me to the city library, and she was surprised because the only books I ever read were textbooks --- and that was begrudgingly.

“This is a baseball book,” I told her. “It’s by a writer named John R. Tunis.”

She looked at me quizzically and then headed to my closet. Beneath layers of baseball gloves, comic books, and shoes, she found the book my aunt had sent me: THE KID FROM TOMKINSVILLE.

I began reading the book that night and found myself racing home from school each day that week to read more --- even skipping my usual radio and TV shows.

This was long before the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles; a time when the only chance to see a major league baseball game was on Saturday mornings.

But Tunis told such a dramatic story that you felt you were actually watching Roy Tucker on the mound and in the batter’s box. After I finished it, I went to the school library and found several more baseball books by Tunis, and I read them all. Each was like a little treasure. I felt this terrible void when I couldn’t find more. I tried to go back to listening to "The Lone Ranger" or "The Green Hornet" on the radio, but it wasn’t the same.

From that point on, I never looked back. I don’t know whatever happened to that electric train, but I held on to those John R. Tunis books for years.

And every Christmas, I’d look forward to more gifts from my aunt; books whose themes eventually went far beyond sports. They made me fall so in love with writing that I could think of nothing more exciting than someday sitting down at a typewriter myself.

-- Bob Hillburn


Tomorrow, Donna VanLiere shares a sweet story about reading to her daughter, while Rosalind Noonan reminisces about teaching hers the importance of goodwill during the holiday season.

Labels: Cornflakes With John Lennon, holiday-blogs-2009, Robert Hilburn

Dolen Perkins Valdez --- whose debut novel, WENCH, hits stores next month --- recalls receiving a very treasured copy of her favorite book one Christmas, and takes the opportunity to thank her favorite author for changing her life.


I owe so much to the writer Toni Morrison. When I first started scribbling stories, I wrote about light things, things that didn't upset anyone too much. I also set my stories in faraway places. In essence, I did everything I could to avoid the profound emotional terrain of my native South. I loved the American South and everything about it: the food, the people, the musical speech. Yet, I was afraid of it. I was afraid that I was too close to it to reveal its complexity. Most of all, I was afraid to unveil the corners of its racial history, and I was not sure that I had the courage to write about it.

I read Toni Morrison's BELOVED while an undergraduate at Harvard in a seminar led by renowned African American Studies scholar Henry Louis Gates, and yet I still failed to grasp it. It was not my professor's fault; I was not ready for Morrison's unflinching eye, her intricate entanglements, or her deep sense of history. Yet when I reread it after graduating, it changed my life. As I read the last sentence, I sat stunned, speechless, moved beyond words. I knew that the writing of this book had taken Morrison to a place where few had dared enter. She had dipped her pen into the hornet's nest of American racial history, and the result was a story unlike anything I'd ever read.

I have often shared this story of my writing journey through Toni Morrison's work with my husband. I told him that I wanted so badly to meet her one day and tell her how she inspired me. Of course, I am sure there are many young writers who would like to do the same. That did not lessen my sense of sadness that in all probability I would never get to meet this giant of letters, given my own literary obscurity. One year on Christmas Eve, my husband called me into the living room, sat me down on the couch and handed me a package. It was a shirt-sized box, and I had no idea what was in it. I ripped off the wrapping paper, watching his eyes as I did it. He was literally trembling with excitement. Inside the box was a signed first edition of Toni Morrison's BELOVED. I felt my spirit rise out of my body. I ran a finger down the cover, turned the book over in my hands. And then I felt something. It was as if Morrison was right there beside me, touching my hand, saying, "Go ahead and open it. It's for you."

And so I say now, in this public forum, "Thank you, Ms. Morrison. Thank you."

-- Dolen Perkins Valdez


Coming up later on this afternoon, Robert Hilburn describes his love of baseball and how a fictional player resonated with him far more than a real one.

Labels: Dolen Perkins Valdez, holiday-blogs-2009, Wench

Sometimes, there is nothing more difficult around the holidays than being away from your home and family. Below, Mahbod Seraji --- author of ROOFTOPS OF TEHRAN --- recalls how he survived his first Christmas in America with the help of some kind friends and a really great book.


I left Iran in 1976 and ended up in Milton, Wisconsin, a little town of a few thousand people, to attend its small four-year college that eventually folded in the early 1980s.

My first year at Milton was miserable. Lonely, cold, and depressed, I watched through the frost-tinged window of my dorm room as other kids loaded up their cars with dirty clothes, suitcases and gifts to leave for the long Christmas holiday. The same scene played out over and over below my window: kids with steam blowing from their mouths and faces reddened by the sub-zero temperatures said their goodbyes, hugged, and shook hands before taking off. This was all new to me. Coming from a middle-class Muslim neighborhood in Tehran, celebrating Christmas would have been as unusual as an American going all out on the Chinese New Year!
Watching the mayhem outside my window, homesick for Tehran nearly 11,000 miles away, I realized for the first time that I was going to miss my obnoxious, loud roommate, Joe. All semester long, I had hated his unsophisticated, rude ways, his late-night noisy drunk entrances, the smell of alcohol on his snores as he slept late in the mornings while I rushed quietly to my early-morning classes.

Joe and his parents, who had come to pick him up, were getting ready to leave, when they turned around, looked up, and waved good bye to me from the parking lot. I waved back. They rushed into their car to escape the brutal wind-chill. And then they were gone and there was nothing but silence, an empty frozen parking lot crisscrossed by tire tracks, the tree branches weighted by the heavy snow that had fallen the night before, and me, still in my dorm room, silent, disheartened, and overwhelmed by a profound sense of loneliness. How was I going to manage four weeks by myself in that huge, completely empty dormitory?

As darkness fell, I turned the TV on and watched the national news, followed by the local, and then "The Odd Couple," and "The Dick Van Dyke Show." The movie of the night was Frank Capra’s classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, which I had seen many times before and loved (it might surprise you to know that the story of George Bailey from Bedford Falls reached us in Iran, but it did --- American movies were extremely popular in Iran prior to the revolution). Feeling a widening pit in my heart and an anger toward that “unidentified everything” which had become my lonely life, I tried to pretend as if I wasn’t crying, but I knew that I was. I wished I was home with my own family, not alone, not in that prison-like fortress, not by myself on Christmas Eve. Where was my guardian angel? Where was my Wonderful Life?

I dozed off in front of the TV and was awoken by a knock on my door. Was I dreaming? It became louder and louder, then I heard the sound of the key in the keyhole and I reached for Joe’s baseball bat, my heart pounding, my breath trapped in my chest.

The door opened and Joe flew in. “Pack your stuff. You’re spending the holidays with us. Hurry up, man, move your lazy Persian ass.”

Joe’s parents stormed in behind him. “Bring your dirty cloths, we’ll wash them at our home,” his mom said with a smile, as she joined Joe, who had begun dragging my suitcase out of the closet.

“I wouldn’t say no, if I were you,” his father, a professor in psychology, whispered. “No sense arguing, after these two make up their minds.” He nodded with a helpless expression that conveyed a lifetime’s attitude of ‘going along.’ They had driven all the way to Chicago before coming back for me.

The next day, at their spacious beautiful suburban home, I received a wonderful gift --- a book called THE ART OF LOVING by Eric Fromm. Love in its purest form, Fromm had argued, was the capacity to love others, to love life, and making the conscious choice of being human.

Nothing, I realized after reading the book, could have made Joe and his parents more human to me that day! For over thirty years now, I call them every Christmas, watch It’s a Wonderful Life, re-read THE ART OF LOVING and remember the love and compassion of people I will never forget.

-- Mahbod Seraji


Tomorrow, Dolen Perkins Valdez delves into her true appreciation of the written word --- one that came after many years of confusion, fear, and trepidation.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Mahbod Seraji, Rooftops of Tehran

Psychologist and social worker Ann Pearlman --- who recently released her first work of holiday-themed fiction, called THE CHRISTMAS COOKIE CLUB --- traces her love of social sciences back to an unexpected gift from her grandfather, and muses on the lifelong effects such a small gesture could have.


I was in early high school when my grandfather gave me THE MARCH OF ARCHAEOLOGY by C. W. Ceram for Christmas. The book’s cover, the famous golden lid of the mummy of Tutankhamen, and the story inside of the discovery of his tomb galvanized me.

I don’t know why my grandfather gave me this book. Perhaps because I had been fascinated by the mummies in the basement cases of the Chicago Museum of Natural History. I had asked him questions about how the bodies had become so petrified. I had marveled at the skin, the hair, the wrappings turned to sandy webs of a person who had lived 4000 years ago and could never have imagined ending up in a museum where a little girl stared into his face and wondered about his life. In any case, I devoured the chapters on the discovery of the tomb, the Rosetta Stone, and culture of ancient Egypt and then scoured the Carnegie Library for books about the creation of mummies, the religion that believed that the body returned life. There, too, I discovered a dusty book teaching hieroglyphics and laboriously labored to translate the Book of the Dead.

Unbelievably, with more chutzpah than I think I could muster now, I walked into the office of the director of the Carnegie museum, my handwritten translation clutched in the crook of my arm, and announced that I was an Egyptologist and wanted a job. Wise man that he was, the director showed me an archive stacked with Native American artifacts: baskets, blankets, moccasins, beaded bands and feathered headdresses, shrunken heads. He needed someone to relabel these items. Alas, the tags were rotting away, and history would be lost. I could save relics of the great people who lived and flourished before Columbus wiped them out with disease and war. For the next two years, because neat penmanship was never my forte, I carefully wrote numbers with India ink on linen labels and tied them to the special artifact wondering at the people who had woven the basket, gathered the feathers, shrunk the head. I skipped a lot of high school to sneak into the huge locked room and complete my task. An act that I’m sure my grandfather would not have censured.

From that book, my love of archaeology expanded to anthropology and psychology. It presented me with a career as a therapist and a writer as I continued my curiosity to understand people within their culture, to uncover, unwrap the commonality between that man turned into a mummy leaning against a wall behind a glass case in Chicago, and me, today writing this in my modern hieroglyphics with my laptop while a plane carries me across the United States.

My grandfather would be so pleased at the impact of that book. And maybe amazed. He could have no idea of the ripples that present would cause or the changes that would take place in his granddaughter’s lifetime.

-- Ann Pearlman


Later on today, Mahbod Seraji reminisces about his first Christmas away from home.

Labels: Ann Pearlman, holiday-blogs-2009, The Christmas Cookie Club

Christina Baker Kline --- author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including CHILD OF MINE, THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE and BIRD IN HAND --- describes a particular favorite holiday story and the family tradition it inspired.


When I was growing up, the oldest of four girls in a small town in Maine, we didn’t have much money. My parents are both Southern --- my mother is from North Carolina, my father from Georgia --- and it was a long way to visit relatives. So we often spent Christmases on our own, far from extended family.

My father was a young professor, and until I was about 10 my mother stayed home with us. A skilled seamstress, she made ornaments out of felt from geometric patterns, and we girls made our own handmade contributions for the tree. Like many families, we gathered around the tree on Christmas Eve and read favorite stories, drank hot chocolate, and strung popcorn. But the most important part of our ritual was the reading of Dick Bruna’s CHRISTMAS.

“On a dark night long ago, and in a faraway country, shepherds kept watch over their sheep. Suddenly a light so bright and beautiful shone upon them. The shepherds thought the new day was dawning. But that was not so.” Bruno’s book pares the nativity story down to its basics: Mary, Joseph, the baby, the barn, several sheep and shepherds, the wise men, some angels, and the North Star. Characterized by bright, simple Scandinavian-inspired design --- it was originally published in 1963 in Amsterdam (and bought by my mother in England, where I was born, in 1964) --- it’s probably the least overtly Christian rendering of the Nativity story you could imagine.

This simple book appealed to all of us in different ways. My baby sisters, Clara and Catherine, loved the brilliant colors. Cynthia and I liked the story. My parents appreciated the lack of dogma.

One year my father, who had learned carpentry as a teenager from his father, a house builder, decided to create a three-dimensional rendering of Bruno’s book. Closely adhering to the illustrations, my father built a crèche and all the figures out of wood. He and my mother lovingly sanded the rounded curves of the figures, the scalloped backs of the sheep, and then painted them in the vivid hues of the original, including the bright yellow North Star in a blue square of sky on the black interior of the barn. A white pipecleaner was the shepherd’s staff. Every year, this Nativity scene had pride of place on a table next to the Christmas tree.

One by one we daughters grew up and left home, eventually marrying and having families of our own. And over the past decade, my parents have been making Dick Bruna crèches for each daughter --- near-exact replicas of the much-loved original.

The only problem was that we didn’t have copies of the book. It had gone out of print, and was completely unavailable (even on Ebay). And then, several holiday seasons ago, browsing in my local bookstore, I stumbled on a new edition. I couldn’t believe it: the familiar slim, long volume, about 11” x 6”, with its bright-yellow spine, the aqua cover with “Christmas” in white type and a white, line-drawn angel with yellow wings hovering above it, the crisp white paper saturated with color on one side. I ordered copies for all of us, so that each sister would have the story to go along with her crèche --- including one for my parents, to display along with the tattered copy that had inspired our family ritual.

It is our children, now, who set up our crèches each year, play-acting with the figures and comparing the two-dimensional illustrations in the book to the figures on the table. And it is they who clamor for the annual tradition: “When the story was finished, the wise man with the white beard said, ‘Now let us go. We have a long journey home.’ Quietly the wise men left. The shepherds went home, too. And Mary and Joseph waved until they were out of sight.”

-- Christina Baker Kline


Tomorrow, Ann Pearlman explores the lasting effects of a simple gesture from her grandfather.

Labels: Bird in Hand, Christina Baker Kline, holiday-blogs-2009

Vanessa Davis Griggs --- author of eight novels, including GOODNESS AND MERCY --- can still remember the very first books she'd owned as a child. While they weren't spectacular pieces of literature, she explains below just how much they meant to her then, and what they still represent for her today.


My love for words began long before the gift I received for Christmas in that one-room-three-grades schoolhouse in Village Springs, Alabama from my first grade teacher, Ms. Knowles. My mother, Mrs. Josephine Davis (something I learned growing up --- to put a “handle” on grown folks’ names), knew the importance of education. She made sure I --- along with my sister and brother at the time (my mother later had two more children: a girl, ten years my junior and a boy, twenty-eight years my junior) --- had a head start in learning, even when there was no school-sanctioned head start or kindergarten to attend.

My mother bought us a system of books that came with records (45s and 78-LPs, now considered antiques…replaced by the technology of CDs, iPods, and MP3s). I specifically remember a red and white book with words and pictures: A for apple, B for bee, and so on. I loved that book! The 45-record was of a woman who not only taught me my vowels, but how to remember them. A, E, I, O, U. “Lady, I owe you some sugar.” My mother also purchased us a set of encyclopedias. Never mind that we, nor our community, had running water or the possibility for indoor plumbing until after I was ten years old. But what our parents were able to do for us, even at great sacrifices, they did.

Those encyclopedias (with the extra books thrown in the sale containing stories and rhymes such as “never having seen a purple cow and never hoping to see one”), would --- as the salesman said to my mother --- “bring the world to our fingertips.” This was pre-Google and, for our community, pre-having a library one could go to. In my mother’s eyes, we would have no excuse for not learning and, definitely, for not knowing. None.

So when I walked inside of that small, one-room building where the first through the third grade sat and learned reading, writing, and arithmetic (excited that one day I’d get to go over to the other one-room building next to ours housing the fourth through the sixth grade), I already loved school, learning, and all that I could get from and out of it.

Then came the gift that was to validate how I myself would someday wrestle with carefully arranged letters of the alphabet to use in the service of exciting others the way I’d been excited. For Christmas, Ms. Knowles presented me with two separately wrapped items. I wasn’t expecting anything, and, in truth, I can’t say if anyone else received what I did. I tore the wrapping off one: it was a small black book written at the third or fourth-grade level. When I tore the wrapping off the second gift, I held a book about Francis Scott Key and his creation of the national anthem: "The Star-Spangled Banner." My first books! Mine to keep. Mine alone. I didn’t have to share them with anyone else. I didn’t have to give them back. I could read them again and again and whenever I wanted.

I quickly devoured the Francis Scott Key book --- an exciting and easy read for me. But the black book contained a word that dared to challenge me to move past it. A word that attempted to stop me cold in my reading tracks. I then recalled words I’d heard many times before. “Sound the word out.” So I began. A…t…t…a…ck. At…tac…k. Then I heard, “Put them together.” At-ta-ck. “Faster.” At-tack. Attack. Success! I did it. I figured it out all by myself! Talk about being excited; I was so excited and yes, hungry for more.

The joy I received from the gift of my first books all those years ago still lives in my heart at age fifty. And it gives me no greater joy than to know that what I do in my life is possibly having that same effect on many who read the works of my hands today. Books: absolutely a gift that can keep on giving.

-- Vanessa Davis Griggs


Join us again later today, as Christina Baker Kline shares a poignant family tradition from her childhood.

Labels: Goodness and Mercy, holiday-blogs-2009, Vanessa Davis Griggs

This afternoon, Kat Martin details how a stirring romance novel gifted to her years ago helped shape the kind of fiction she writes, and directly influenced her latest holiday-themed novel, THE CHRISTMAS CLOCK.


Over the years, I’ve received dozens of books as holiday gifts: coffee table books, self-help books, non-fiction, and novels that strictly entertain.

One of those books changed my life. It was a work of fiction given to me nearly 30 years ago by a friend who had loved it, a novel written by Wilbur Smith. The name of the book was the EAGLE IN THE SKY, and it was the most dramatic, most exciting, most romantic story I’ve ever read. To this day, just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes. That is the power of a book.

In my case, the effects of the novel were profound though, at the time, I didn’t know it. People often ask me why I write romantic stories. As I look back, I think that maybe that single work of fiction influenced my choice of genre. Today, I’ve written more than 45 romantic suspense and historical romance novels, but even my latest, THE CHRISTMAS CLOCK --- a different sort of book for me --- is a story filled with romance. It’s about life in a small Michigan town, the story of an old woman with Alzheimer’s, and a little orphan boy.

The story isn’t long. It should have been easy for me, but as I began to write, it soon became apparent that the book was going nowhere.

“What’s missing?” I asked myself. The answer came swift and hard: romance. And so I started all over again, and, miraculously, this time the story came together. It’s a warm-hearted tale, I think, the kind of Christmas miracle we all look for in our lives.

And so when I look at THE CHRISTMAS CLOCK and think of my writing, I can’t help but remember Wilbur Smith and THE EAGLE IN THE SKY. A book can make a profound difference in a person’s life. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best gift anyone could ever receive.

-- Kat Martin


Tomorrow, Vanessa Davis Griggs explains how devouring her first book didn’t quench her hunger for literature; it expanded it.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Kat Martin, The Christmas Clock

Truman Capote's heartbreaking short story, "A Christmas Memory," is a perennial favorite around this time of year, and Jill McCorkle --- author of GOING AWAY SHOES --- explains why she's given countless copies as holiday presents over the years.


The most memorable book I have ever given for a Christmas present is the wonderful edition of Capote's story, “A Christmas Memory,” which Random House printed. The book came in a sleeve with a photograph of a very young Capote and his elderly cousin “Sook” --- a photograph that is referenced in the story as one taken by someone traveling through, someone on the list of all those who receive a fruitcake from the narrator, “Buddy,” and his elderly friend. It is a beautiful Christmas story, one I read each and every year --- sometimes alone, sometimes aloud to my classes, oftentimes both. I have given it so many times by now I can't even remember when and to whom.

I have also given the VHS and then DVD of the film version starring Geraldine Page. I remembered seeing it on television one Christmas Eve when I was a child, but all I could recall was the wonderful narrative voice describing first the way the two made money for ingredients, and then the detail of the cakes they baked and where they sent them. I remembered that I cried and cried over the sad ending --- one of those good cleansing cries, where you feel both uplifted and changed. For many years, I tried to figure out what I had seen and how I could see it again. It was in high school when I came across the short story and recognized from that first line: "Imagine a morning in late November...." and I knew I had found what I had been looking for. It's a classic treasure, a great short story and one that I plan to keep giving.

-- Jill McCorkle


Later today, Kat Martin reflects on the power of the written word and its influence on her craft.

Labels: Going Away Shoes, holiday-blogs-2009, Jill McCorkle

Mary Burton --- whose latest thriller, DYING SCREAM, hits stores tomorrow --- describes the simplest gifts that conjure fond memories of Christmases past.

Freshly baked cookies, cider, a roasting turkey, and evergreens always send my mind racing back to Christmas as a child when the holiday was infused with so much excitement. In a blink, I’m lying awake in the pre-dawn hours of Christmas too excited to sleep, straining to hear the sound of Santa’s sleigh. Finally I drift off only to awake and discover my stocking at the foot of the bed stuffed with goodies and candies. And then I’m waiting at the top of the stairs, my toes tapping with anticipation, as Mom shouts up to me, “Oh, Santa has outdone himself!” Finally, she sounds the “all clear” and I race down the stairs to see what Santa left under the Christmas tree.

There are a few gifts that still make me smile ear to ear to this day: the bright yellow motorized mini-bike with the black seat and wickedly tall handlebars that made an awful noise, kicked out a good bit of smoke, but moved so fast; the Easy Bake Oven that ignited my love of cooking that is still with me today. And of course, the simpler gifts that I still treasure: THE SECRET OF THE OLD CLOCK by Carolyn Keene, which was the first book in the Nancy Drew Mystery series. Those books hooked me on mysteries and suspense. THE SECRET GARDEN by Frances Hodgson Burnett and A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeleine L’Engle stoked my imagination and made me dream of being a writer.

When I want to rekindle those fond memories, I simply go to my bookshelf and pull out another old favorite Christmas gift: my copy of the JOY OF COOKING, which is so well used it’s held together with duct tape. As soon as I start baking gingerbread cookies or cinnamon bread, the house fills with those familiar delicious scents, and Christmas returns once again.

-- Mary Burton


Tomorrow, Jill McCorkle and Kat Martin share the classic stories that truly touched them during the holiday season.

Labels: Dying Scream, holiday-blogs-2009, Mary Burton

Marie Bostwick --- co-author of SNOW ANGELS, featured in this week's Basket of Holiday Cheer contest --- thinks back to one particularly tough Christmas, and fondly recalls the present she received which made that difficult time seem magical.


When I was a little girl, the youngest of four daughters, our Christmases were large and lavish. We liked to put our tree up during the first week of December. As soon as the decorating was done and the colored lights illuminated, we placed dozens of presents under the evergreen branches. As the days ticked off to December 25th, the pile of presents spread in an ever-widening ring, burying the living room rug under a sea of red, green, and gold packages.

One Christmas morning, my sisters and I ran downstairs to discover that, in addition to the bulging stockings, Santa had left us a complete play kitchen with a miniature refrigerator oven and a sink that had actual running water! In the mid-sixties, this was nothing short of miraculous. My sisters and I were the envy of the neighborhood.

But, a few months later, my parents separated, and my mother told me they were getting a divorce. When I was older, I learned that our family business had gone under at about the same time.

Our world changed overnight. My mother, who had been going to college part-time, increased her course load, wanting to finish her degree as quickly as possible so she could get a job that would support us. But we needed money now, so Mom also took a night job in a bookstore. Babysitters were expensive, so I’d spend my afternoons at the bookstore sitting cross-legged on the floor in the children’s section, quietly reading book after book while my mother waited on customers.

My favorite volume was a beautiful hardbound copy of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, printed on thick, creamy paper with exquisite colored illustrations. The reading level was beyond me, but that didn’t matter. I loved that book. The vivid illustrations provided good clues as to the plot. Even so, I wished my mom could sit down and read it to me. But I knew she didn’t have time for that or money enough to buy the book so we could read it at home. Young as I was, I understood that money was tight.

When Christmas came, there was no mountain of gifts spilling out from under the tree branches. We did have presents, but they were few and modest, and opening them without my dad felt strange. My mother gave me two gifts that year, a round cardboard box containing one hundred crayons and, yes, that beautiful edition of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ. After opening it, I danced around the tree for joy, holding the book over my head like a trophy.

Mom started to cry. I stopped dancing and stared at her. My sisters stared, too. We’d never seen anyone cry on Christmas. Christmas was supposed to be the highlight of the year. It always had been before.

Sniffling and wiping away tears, Mom apologized. “I just feel bad. I tried my best but I couldn’t afford much Christmas this year. I’m sorry. I know you must be disappointed. You don’t have to pretend.”

But I wasn’t pretending. Ten running-water play kitchens couldn’t have delighted me more than that book. I tried to explain that to my mother.

I don’t remember exactly what I said but I do remember that she stopped crying. And I do remember bringing Mom my book and asking her to read to me.

And I remember that Christmas, sitting on my mother’s lap, turning the pages as she read and, together, we left the world of broken dreams and empty promises, and traveled down the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of Oz.

-- Marie Bostwick


Stop by later today as Mary Burton tells us how a few books on a cold December 25th changed her life and launched her into the world of writing.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Marie Burton, Snow Angels

Today's guest blogger is Kaitlin O'Riley, author of DESIRE IN HER EYES. Below, she remembers one humorous holiday from her childhood when she and her sister found an old family trinket far more interesting than the piles of new, expensive presents they received in their stockings that Christmas.


I am an unabashed lover of all things Christmas. Everything about the yuletide season --- from the familiar carols, to the twinkling lights, to the chance of snow to spending time with my family --- makes me ridiculously happy. Warm gingerbread, mulling spices, a lush pine wreath with a cheery red bow, sleigh bells… I love it all. There is something about the magic of the winter season that inspires me with hope and a sense of renewal. Perhaps it’s because my birthday is exactly one week before Christmas Eve.

I know some people view a Christmas birthday as a drawback, when any birthday gifts and celebrations get lost in the hustle and bustle of the season. But I don’t feel that way. Because I have a December birthday, I feel a special connection to Christmas. Which also might have something to do with the fact that when I was born, my parents brought me home from the hospital on Christmas Day in a red stocking. Not that I recall this event, but I am told by very reliable sources that my father hung up that stocking, with me inside. My three older sisters said I was the best Christmas present they ever got. And I still have that red stocking to this day.

I have so many magical memories of Christmas it’s almost impossible to pick my favorite, but one story is particularly amusing and reminds me of how easily children can be pleased.

On the Christmas when I was eight years old and my sister Jennifer was five, Santa brought us everything we could possibly want. A beautiful pink bassinette for my baby dolls, a handmade doll house, a brand new bicycle with a banana seat and pretty streamers. What little girl wouldn’t love that? Of course, I was delighted with my new-found treasures, as was my sister with hers. You would think we would have played with our wonderful toys all day, wouldn’t you?

Well, it just so happens that I found a long necklace of my mother’s that morning. It was made of silver beads of graduating sizes. The chain had broken and the beads were now loose. As unbelievable as it sounds, my little sister and I spent Christmas Day and quite a few of the following days not playing with our new toys, but playing with those pretty silver beads. Jennifer and I made little families out of them, with the larger ones parents and the smaller ones the children. Using empty jewelry gift boxes, we made tiny houses for them, lined in cotton. We gave them individual names, but called them “nellies” collectively. We rolled them around the hardwood floors and created stories about them. To the complete bafflement of our older sisters and our parents, Jennifer and I ignored all our expensive Christmas gifts and played with a broken necklace.

Oh, eventually we lost interest in our imaginary bead families and enjoyed our presents, but it still makes our family laugh to recall that particular Christmas. Jennifer and I had so much fun that day, because even something as mundane as a broken necklace can become magical on Christmas. And it’s the reason I always hang a silver bead garland on my own Christmas tree every year.

-- Kaitlin O'Riley


Tomorrow, Marie Bostwick and Mary Burton share stories about the transformative power of books, especially around the holidays.

Labels: Desire In His Eyes, holiday-blogs-2009, Kaitlin O'Riley

Newt Gingrich, who recently co-authored TO TRY MEN’S SOULS: A Novel of George Washington and the Fight for American Freedom, details his nearly impossible Christmas wish for a literary rarity in a story that ends in a true holiday fashion.


As a lover of reading, I have many fond memories of receiving and giving books for Christmas. One memory in particular involves a classic work by Winston Churchill.

It was summer, and I was reading a book by Robert Kaplan about modern challenges in poor countries. In it, Kaplan referenced Churchill's book, THE RIVER WAR.

As a very young man, Churchill was an officer in the British Army. With his mother's help, he talked his way into Kitchener's campaign up the Nile in 1898.

Churchill was endlessly energetic and managed to both be at the main battle at Omdurman and write a book about the campaign.

Kitchener, the commanding general, deeply disapproved of a young officer taking it upon himself to render judgment about a campaign, even when Churchill was flattering him. The very idea of a young man thinking he could comment irritated the most famous British general of the age.

However, whatever approval Churchill lost amongst the establishment, he more than gained in public fame and celebrity status as a daring military adventurer and writer.

Callista had been asking me to think of something I really wanted for Christmas. Suddenly, Kaplan had given me the answer: I wanted an early edition of Churchill's THE RIVER WAR.

I didn’t want a first edition because that would have been far too expensive. However, I did want a book from before World War I that would feel and smell like the books of Churchill’s youth.

Callista looked at me with some exasperation.

This was not an Amazon.com, easy-order opportunity. However, she gamely decided she would do her best to make my Christmas wish come true.

Callista found a great online organizer of historic books called Abe Books. It had almost everything a book lover could want.

On Christmas Day, waiting for me when we got home from Mass, there was a beautifully wrapped early edition of THE RIVER WAR, exactly the gift I had dreamed of.

The next day, as we left to visit Callista's parents, I held firmly in my grasp Churchill's work. I spent my spare time the first few days after Christmas devouring Churchill’s words and marveling at his command of the English language.

Seldom has a book made me happier at Christmas.

-- Newt Gingrich


Check back later today, as Kaitlin O'Riley illustrates how even the most trivial of objects can seem magical around the holidays.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Newt Gingrich, To Try Men's Souls

Suzan Colón, author of CHERRIES IN WINTER, thinks back to the special relationship she shared with her grandfather, and the parallels between her own life and that of Johanna Spyri's titular character, HEIDI.

When I was about eight or nine, our black-and-white television set broke, and Mom announced that we didn’t have the money to fix it. I was a latchkey kid, an only child with a single parent; after school, the TV kept me company until my mother got home from work. I stuck my bottom lip out for a while, and when that didn’t produce any results from Mom, I demanded to know what I was supposed to do until she got home. “Go to the library,” she said, in a tone of voice that indicated the end of me giving her lip of any kind, “and get a book.”

I did, and I became a voracious reader. I went through books quickly, and when I was at my grandparents’ house, I’d feast on their reading matter, which was a lot like the food they served: simple and typical of the sixties and seventies. I was raised on meatloaf and mashed potatoes, Little Golden Books and Reader’s Digest. (I was also exposed to Jacqueline Susann’s ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH, but I had the good sense to wait until Nana and Grandpa were asleep to leaf through that purple-covered potboiler.)

I don’t remember which Christmas it was that I got a copy of HEIDI as a gift --- I know it wasn’t the one when I was hanging ornaments and Nana’s tree, with its all-white boughs and lights in primary colors, fell on me. It was probably around the time I turned seven, and Nana died, and I read the book several times in a row. The story of a little girl who goes to live with her grandfather, a gruff widower, suddenly seemed very important to me. Heidi was an orphan; I was a kid whose mother worked long hours, who saw her biological father and his new family once a week, and whose Nana had been serving our lunch on doll plates one weekend and had gone to heaven by the next. Heidi’s grandfather, though he had a reputation for being something of a grumpy bastard, doted on her; my grandfather, who I’d heard from whispering adults in the kitchen could be the b-word on occasion, adored me. Heidi’s grandfather gave her fresh milk and cheese from the goats he kept. My grandfather caught bluefish for me from the inlet we lived on. I read --- and re-read --- the story, relieved every time to see that Heidi’s grandfather never left her.

Of course, my grandfather would eventually leave me. But fortunately, not for many more afternoons of the two of us eating toasted cheese sandwiches together --- just like Heidi and her grandfather did.

-- Suzan Colón


Tomorrow, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich shares a touching anecdote of just how far loved ones will go to make you happy --- the Christmas spirit at its finest.

Labels: Cherries in Winter, holiday-blogs-2009, Suzan Colon

Oftentimes, as adults, we revisit the books we've read as children and come away with an entirely new understanding of old, familiar stories. Gretchen Rubin, author of THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, recalls such an experience with the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.


My favorite memory of receiving a book as a gift dates back to the Christmas when I’d just turned six years old. My beautiful LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS was inscribed: “Merry Christmas to Gretchen, with all our love --- with the hope that you’ll love the stories about Laura and her family as much as your Mommy loved them.”

I loved this book beyond anything I’d ever read before.

I wasn’t quite able yet to read it comfortably myself, so my father would read me two chapters each night before I went to bed. I could read well enough to know when he skipped, however, and I remember taking great pleasure in scolding him when he didn’t read every word (a game that I’m now quite familiar with as the parent doing the reading!).

Every year, for the next seven years, I unwrapped the next book in the series. I couldn’t wait to read them, of course, and I’d raced through the whole series by the time I had my own set, but each year I looked forward to getting my fresh new volume.

I’ve re-visited those books as an adult, too, many times; few novels withstand multiple re-readings as well as the Little House books.

Have you read those books? Do you remember the ending of LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS? I didn’t understand it when I was six years old, but now I do:

She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth…She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

-- Gretchen Rubin


Check back later today as Suzan Colón describes the personal significance of Johanna Spyri's HEIDI.

Labels: Gretchen Rubin, holiday-blogs-2009, LIttle House in the Big Woods, Little House series

Today's guest blogger is Celia Rivenbark, a humor columnist and the author of five essay collections including STOP DRESSING YOUR SIX YEAR OLD LIKE A SKANK, WE'RE JUST LIKE YOU, ONLY PRETTIER, and YOU CAN'T DRINK ALL DAY IF DON'T START IN THE MORNIN'. Below, she shares details about an eccentric personality trait shared among the women in her family, and a traditional German folktale seemingly created just for them.

I come from a long line of worriers. My maternal grandmother was so famously worried about her daughter and granddaughters flying in a light rain one Christmas that she called the Atlanta airport and demanded to speak to the pilot to plead with him not to gamble with the lives of her grandchildren.

My mother, unfortunately, inherited this worry gene and, even more unfortunately, so did I. We worry about things in our control (did we unplug the coffeemaker before going to work?) to things that are so not in our control (will any of us get brain cancer?)

So it came to pass many years ago on another sunny North Carolina coastal Christmas, that I presented my sister and my mother (Grandmother had passed by then in her sleep, which was so not how she envisioned her death, at the hands of an ax-wielding psychopath who would break into her house) with the perfect book for all of us.

I had to special-order THE THREE SILLIES because it was practically out of print. I tracked it down because I had loved it as a child for its message that you can’t let outlandish fears keep you from living life to the fullest.

My grandmother and mother never saw the irony of how much they loved this old German folktale, reading it to my sister and me night after night as we snuggled in our beds, waiting for the serial killer to show up. Or, perhaps, scurvy.

We loved the tale of a handsome young man who believed his beloved and her family were the three silliest people in the world until he met three others who are even sillier. It wasn’t that his beloved’s family was simply silly, they were pathological worriers.

Oh, how we howled with laughter at the pictures of the young woman and her parents sobbing uncontrollably in the basement. Why? Because they worried that, one day, the young couple would have a son and that son would go to the basement to fetch some cider and an ax would fall on his head from above and kill him.

I know. Crazy, right? But it wasn’t that far removed from my own childhood. The call to the Atlanta airport was just one of hundreds of nutty scenarios hatched in the worried minds of the women in my family.

So, when my husband came into the picture, and I shared with him the tattered book that I’d loved so much, he said, “I see why you love it. You all ARE the three sillies.”

I suppose I could’ve been insulted, but he was right. So, I found three copies of the beautifully illustrated tale, retold and illustrated by Paul Galdone, and placed them under the tree.
Seeing the looks on the faces of my mother and sister made it worthwhile. There was silence as they turned each page, savoring the text and especially the illustrations that were alike, yet a little different, from the original.

Later that day, as we sat around my dining table and eyed a lovely turkey bird, we began to fret. What if the turkey wasn’t as done as it should be? Wasn’t it tinged with pink? Didn’t that mean we’d all get botulism? Better to just eat the side dishes. Silly? Maybe. But we didn’t spend the night in the emergency room, now did we?

-- Celia Rivenbark


Tomorrow, both Gretchen Rubin and Suzan Colón blog about the times that they had with great books and loving family.

Labels: Celia Rivenbark, holiday-blogs-2009, You Can't Drink All Day if You Don't Start in the Morning

Wade Rouse, author of the memoirs AMERICA'S BOY, CONFESSIONS OF A PREP SCHOOL MOMMY HANDLER, and AT LEAST IN THE CITY SOMEONE WOULD HEAR ME SCREAM, recounts summers in the Ozarks with his grandma and how that special time helped to mold him into the man he is today.


I spent my childhood summers at a log cabin in the Ozarks with my grandparents. It sat on a beautiful bluff overlooking a shimmering ribbon of water called, sweetly, Sugar Creek. On summer Sundays, I would join my grandma on a barn-red glider that sat on a bluff beside the cabin, and she would read to me from her two favorite books: The Bible and WALDEN.

My grandma, one of God’s true foot soldiers, used to tell me in our “Creek Coffee Chats” that she felt the Bible was more for her after-life but that Walden was for her here-life. Now, in the Ozarks, that was a courageous thing to admit, considering, as my grandma used to tell me, such an admission would earn her the cuckoo whistle at the Piggly Wiggly.

My grandma was a very wise woman, but, as a woman born in the early 1900s, she was never in a position to follow her dream of being a fashion designer. Rather, she was worked as a seamstress out of her church’s basement. Which is why my grandma, I believe, always told me to pursue my passion and to not, as Henry David Thoreau --- a man who serves as my inspiration in my current memoir, AT LEAST IN THE CITY SOMEONE WOULD HEAR ME SCREAM --- wrote in WALDEN “fall into a particular route,” meaning once we became adults and got our tires firmly entrenched in the mud of life, they usually refused to ever go off track.

Due to her encouragement, I used to journal about everything going on around me in my tiny Ozarks town: Whether I was forced to go cowtippin’ with the country boys or watch my brother nail rabbit pelts to our giant oak tree, it seemed to be only the only way a boy with a fondness for ascots and dreams of being a writer could make sense of his rural world.

For a while when I was young, I called my mom, a nurse, “Digit,” because she became infamous in our little town for being the go-to gal whenever a local cut off a toe with a lawnmower or whacked off a finger with a chainsaw. My mother would answer our giant red, rotary phone, the kind presidents use in comedy skits when they are about to launch a nuclear bomb, and calmly say, “Do you have your big toe? Well, can you locate it? Good!”

And then she would rush out of the house, often barefoot, in a nightgown, with a little Igloo cooler filled with ice. She would retrieve the detached digit and personally rush the injured idiot to the ER of the neighboring hospital where she worked.

“Good stuff!” my grandma said, when I’d read her such passages from my journal.

It was largely because of her that I applied and was accepted to graduate school at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. In fact, my grandma willed herself --- as she was dying of cancer --- to help drive me to Chicago to see the campus firsthand. And during my first semester, she wrote me long letters asking if I were, à la Thoreau, “on the right/write path.”

My grandma held on long enough for me to return home on Christmas break to show her some of my writing. “Good stuff!” she smiled.

My grandmother was buried days before Christmas, but she left me two special gifts to open: Her old copy of WALDEN and a journal filled with letters she had written me but never mailed.

And those gifts would eventually change my life.

When I hit 40 with a hideous thud --- a crash that I write about in my second memoir, CONFESSIONS OF A PREP SCHOOL MOMMY HANDLER, which chronicles my tenure as PR director at one of the nation’s oldest, richest, most prestigious prep schools, where I eventually realize my real job is to cater to a catty Lilly Pulitzer-clad clique of “Mean Mommies” --- I rediscovered WALDEN and my grandmother’s letters and finally asked myself if I were “on the right/write path.”

And so, remembering my grandma, my partner and I leapt off a bridge without a parachute. We --- in spite of people telling us we should be institutionalized --- quit our high-paying jobs, left the city, cable and consumerism behind, and moved to the woods of Michigan in order to recreate a modern-day WALDEN and pursue my dream of being a writer, all of which is chronicled in my latest memoir, AT LEAST IN THE CITY SOMEONE WOULD HEAR ME SCREAM, which was selected this year by NBC’s Today Show as a Must-Read.

There is a quote in WALDEN that my grandmother earmarked for me long ago, which I re-read nearly every week:

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

Such is the enduring power of words, of letters, of dreams, of books.

They can, and do, change lives.

-- Wade Rouse


This evening, Celia Rivenbark reminisces about a favorite picture book, and reflects on the lighter side of being a born-worrier.

Labels: At Least in The City Someone Would Hear Me Scream, holiday-blogs-2009, Wade Rouse

This evening, Holly Goddard Jones --- author of GIRL TROUBLE: Stories --- traces her reverence for the written word back to one childhood Christmas, and the life lessons learned from the unforgettable presents she received.


Though I come from a book-reading family, I don’t come from a book-gifting family. My parents were dedicated library patrons --- we usually went once a week --- and most of the books I purchased in my tweens and teens came from a dark little shop called The Book Rack, which exclusively sold comic books and used mass market paperbacks. The Book Rack was in the same aging strip mall as my mother’s regular Laundromat, and so I spent many, many hours of childhood in there browsing, exchanging pleasantries with the store’s owner --- a woman with big eyeglasses and brassy hair teased up into a loose bun --- and finally retreating to the store’s spooky, closet-sized back room, where the horror novels were shelved. I remember that the far wall was decorated with a cardboard cutout of Hannibal Lecter, wearing his iconic mask and straight jacket. More often than not, I’d plop right down in the floor, pull something by Stephen King off the shelf, and read until I’d determined if the book was worth the 50-cent price penciled inconspicuously into the front cover. Hannibal watched silently over my shoulder.

The only books that took up permanent residence in our home were an incomplete collection of World Book Encyclopedias, purchased during a library sale, and a few hardcover reissued classics, plucked from a bargain bin at Big Lots. We weren’t a family that romanticized the act of reading; we read for pleasure rather than edification and without self-consciousness, the way we watched television or put together jigsaw puzzles. We kept our books on bedside tables, armrests, in the bathroom --- not on shelves. My parents didn’t seem to place a lot of value on the book itself as an artifact. Why own it when you can check it out for free?

That said, I remember getting three books --- beautiful books --- from my parents as Christmas gifts: THE SECRET GARDEN and A LITTLE PRINCESS, both by Francis Hodgson Burnett, and HEIDI by Johanna Spyri. Of course, I was reading these stories at an age that just preceded my forays into the dark back section of that paperback thrift store, but not by much, and the passage from one to the other is blurry. It seems possibly to me now --- indeed, likely --- that I would have reread those children’s classics in the same year that I was first sampling the violence and frank sexuality of novels by Stephen King. And even now, I can see space for both in the brain and heart of my 11 or 12-year-old self. They were all journey stories: the young female protagonists of Hodgson and Spyri deliciously orphaned, dropped among strangers, forced to get by with their imaginations and ingenuity; the protagonists of King somehow isolated, estranged, like the alcoholic caretaker in THE SHINING; or in IT, the “Losers,” a pack of kids so awkward, so unpopular, that they’d rather fight the forces of evil than contend with the cruelty of their own classmates.

Reading King then was an act of defiance: the kind of act that was supposed to take place in a tucked-away room or in sullen silences from the back seat of my father’s car. The book itself was designed for disposal, for ill-treatment, and I used it accordingly, bending the cheap spine in half, dog-earing the pages, holding my place with nothing nicer than a store receipt or a foil chewing gum wrapper. The gift books were different. They all had pastel ribbons sewn into the bindings to use as book marks, and when the ribbon started to fray, I fretfully trimmed the end. A LITTLE PRINCESS had a high-gloss cover, rich in earth tones, with a detailed illustration of Sara on the rooftop of her boarding school, feeding birds; THE SECRET GARDEN had a dust jacket, which I reverently removed during reading, wanting to see it damaged no more than I did the hard cover. Of the three books, HEIDI was perhaps the loveliest --- the cover was blue faux leather, lightweight and pillowy, and the pages were tipped in gold foil. Best yet, there were illustration plates spaced evenly throughout the pages, so that you might be on page 30 before you could see the artist’s interpretation of Heidi’s journey up the mountain.

I write about these books not because they were formative --- though I suppose they were, their permanence in my household making them so, insuring they’d be read and reread --- but because they taught me the pleasure of the book as an artifact. I still like the subversive thrill of a used paperback, the kind of book I can take on a plane or out on the porch swing, the kind of book that I can smudge and tatter in good conscience. But books are worthy of our reverence, of our little household shrines, and that’s why I’m willing now to invest in them and to give them.

-- Holly Goddard Jones


Tomorrow, we will have a very special Thanksgiving treat for you as Wade Rouse comes by to share his memories of Thoreau, missing digits, and a very special grandmother.

Labels: Girl Trouble, holiday-blogs-2009, Holly Goddard Jones

In an equally heartwarming and heartbreaking story about her mother, Cathy Lamb --- author of JULIA'S CHOCOLATES, THE LAST TIME I WAS ME and HENRY'S SISTER --- illustrates how, like the famous quote says, you gotta put up with the rain if you want the rainbow.


My mother and I loved to laugh.

Bette Jean Thornburgh Straight did not have a lot to laugh about in her own childhood, so maybe that’s why she believed every day needed a dose of joy and a good laugh in it, especially during the holidays.

It was in this spirit that I gave her a tiny book, four inches tall, called WOMEN’S WIT AND WISDOM, for Christmas one year. I wrapped it up in snowman wrapping paper, slapped on a floppy red bow, and stuck it under a tree crammed full of homemade ornaments from her grandchildren and the intricate feathered birds she so loved.

WOMEN’S WIT AND WISDOM was full of quotes like this one from Katharine Hepburn, “If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.”

And from Katherine Mansfield, “If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.”

Or, one of my favorites, from Lily Tomlin, “The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”

The book, with all the brassy, sassy and free-wheeling comments and advice from women, had me and my mother laughing and chatting. From Christmas morning on, it sparked conversations about life, men, relationships, love, and the role of women in her generation and mine. I once told my mother I particularly liked this quote by Dolly Parton, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

The rain poured down on my mother in the fall of 2000. We were grocery shopping with my kids after having coffee, hers black, mine a decaf mocha. A vertebra in my mother’s back cracked when she picked up a bag of vegetables and yellow apples, and it was downhill from there.

My Bette Jean, who never smoked a day in her life, had metastasized lung cancer and was not curable. I will not get into all the sad, wrenching details --- those of you who have dealt with cancer already know them --- but through the radiation and chemotherapy, we kept laughing. Why not? It was what we’d done all our lives.

I didn’t laugh much for awhile after she died in 2002, less than two weeks after Christmas. My laughter seemed to be stuck in my heart while the rest of me was crying, and I could not find the rainbow Dolly was talking about. My father, brought to his knees after my mother died, died in 2007 of cancer also. When my brother and sisters and I cleaned out their home and divided furniture and photos and feathered bird ornaments and eight million other emotional things, we four kids made a rule that whatever you gave our parents as gifts was yours to take back again if you wished.

I took back WOMEN’S WIT AND WISDOM. On the inside cover I wrote, “To Bette Jean Thornburgh Straight, with love from her daughter, Cathy Marie Straight Lamb.” I’ll give it to my daughters one Christmas, all wrapped up in reds and greens with a floppy bow and, hopefully, they’ll give it to their daughters on Christmas, too. I envision the ladies of the family re-gifting it to each other, and signing it, maybe across their favorite quote, and then we’ll have a generational heirloom of our own. A tiny book heirloom, so to speak, that is brought out when the stockings are hung, the grandchildren have made ornaments, the feathered birds are hanging from the branches, and there’s laughter over the egg nog.

And maybe one day a great-great granddaughter of mine will cuddle up in front of the fire, watch the lights flicker on the Christmas tree, and appreciate this quote by Tallulah Bankhead, just like my mother and I did, “It’s the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time.”

-- Cathy Lamb


Be sure to check back later today as Holly Goddard Jones tells a tale of how a love of reading and a love of books are not necessarily the same thing.

Labels: Cathy Lamb, Henry's Sister, holiday-blogs-2009, Women's Wit and Wisdom

Today's guest blogger is Lisa Scottoline, bestselling author of sixteen thrillers and one work of nonfiction --- the newly released WHY MY THIRD HUSBAND WILL BE A DOG: The Amazing Adventures of An Ordinary Woman. Below, gives us a heartwarming mother-daughter tale about how it’s never too late to give the gift of literature.


I grew up in a household filled with laughter, love, and meatballs but only one book.

It wasn’t the Bible.

It was TV Guide.

By way of background, both of my parents were first-generation immigrants from Italy to Philadelphia, and my mother grew up the youngest of nineteen children. Yes, you read that right. The Scottolines make Octo-Mom look like a slacker.

My mother’s family was impoverished (and whose wouldn’t be?), and though she graduated from high school, she couldn’t afford college. Still, she’s one smart cookie, and she became a secretary, learning to type at warp speed and to take Gregg shorthand, which you’re too young to know about. But she never read for pleasure, and even after I had become an author, she didn’t read my books.

Though she went one better.

She’d do anything to help me, so she proofread a draft of each of my sixteen novels, each time sending me pages of corrections written with a shaky red flair, comments like “AIN’T IS NOT A WORD, HONEY!!”

And despite that fact that she always said something nice about the books (“GREAT JOB, SWEETIE”), I know she didn’t read them for content. She was too busy making sure the words were correct, especially because she knows I can’t type.

But one Christmas, I asked her why she didn’t read books, and she answered, “Why bother? I can’t see the words anymore. I do the crossword with a magnifying glass.”

I felt terrible. I hadn’t realized. She lives with my brother in Miami. “Ma, If I got you a book you could see, would you read it?”

“If it’s a good one.”

I was on it. I went to the bookstore and bought her a few books in large print, though I knew the one she’d pick first, and I was right:

FRANK SINATRA: A Life.

She read it like a fiend, never leaving the chair next to the Christmas tree, and two days later, she finally closed her book. Her milky brown eyes looked tired behind her trifocals, but her face wore a smile. She said, “That was a great book!”

“What did you like about it?” I asked, which proved unnecessary, because for the rest of her visit, all she talked about was Frank Sinatra. And when she went back to Miami, she went to the first book signing of her life, at the wonderful Books & Books on Lincoln Road, where she scored her first autographed book:

THE GOOD LIFE by Tony Bennett.

Now she reads all the time, and I keep her supplied like a high-rent pusher, and I know she’ll be reading my new book because she’s its heroine. It’s my first nonfiction book, entitled WHY MY THIRD HUSBAND WILL BE A DOG: The Amazing Adventures of An Ordinary Woman, and it’s a collection of funny stories from my real life. Mother Mary inspired the book because of her strength and resilience in all she lived through. She’s exactly what Eleanor Roosevelt was talking about when she said, “A woman is like a tea bag. You don’t know how strong she is until she’s in hot water.”

I think my stories will resonate with you as well as make you laugh out loud. I write about how I convinced Mother Mary to throw away her 30-year-old bra, why you should burn your Spanx, and how to survive Valentine’s Day when you’re very single like me. Hint: get a dog and love it. Because the thing about love is that you can’t control whether you get it, but you can control whether you give it, and each feels as good as the other. Your heart doesn’t know if it’s loving a puppy, a man, or spaghetti. If your heart were that smart, it would be your brain.

So enjoy the book, and the holidays, and remember:

Ain’t is not a word, honey.


-- Lisa Scottoline


We’ll be giving you a double dose of holiday blogs tomorrow as both Cathy Lamb and Holly Goddard Jones stop by to share their personal memories on literature and how it affected their holidays.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Lisa Scottoline, Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog

Today, SMASHER author Keith Raffel writes about molding his children’s love of all things literary, and how this love fostered an unforgettable holiday tradition.

I’m sure it’s a sign of my egocentricity, but I wanted my kids to love baseball, horse racing, and reading just like me. I struck out on baseball, lost my bet on racing, but hit the jackpot on reading.

Almost from the day my children were born, I started reading to them. Somewhere between ages five and seven, each of my four kids wrestled the book we were reading away from me and started reading it on his or her own. In fact, such pleasure did I get out of a child nestled on my lap, listening with rapt attention, that I suspect --- egoist that I am --- we’d still be having kids if not for biological constraints and my wife’s good sense.

Early reading left an imprint on my kids’ brains. I try not to spoil my four children. I can say no to a Wii, to a car, and a trip to Europe, but not to books. Whatever they want. My 10 year old has turned into a literary snob. He wants to own books, not check them out from the library. He can read a $25 tome in three hours (he’s now busy reading James Rollins). Like his older sisters, he’s inherited my love of books, my bibliophilia.

Bibliophilia is a seasonal disease that, like vampires, flourishes when the nights are long and dark --- in other words, during the holiday season that starts with Thanksgiving.

For 15 years, on the fourth Thursday in November, I’d read MOLLY’S PILGRIM by Barbara Cohen to my pre-adolescent children, nieces, and nephews. The book takes place about a century ago, just after Molly and her parents have moved from a Jewish village in Europe to a small town in Middle America. Molly’s mother speaks no English but is a superb seamstress. As a Thanksgiving project for school, Molly is assigned to bring in a homemade pilgrim doll. Her mother is ready to tackle the project. Just one problem: the mother doesn’t know what a pilgrim is. When Molly explains the pilgrims were people who left the old country to seek freedom and the right to worship as they pleased, her mother nods with understanding.

By the time Molly awakens the next morning, her mother has made a beautiful doll that looks nothing like a seventeenth-century Englishwoman. Instead, she’s decided she herself is a pilgrim and made a perfect miniature of herself as a child, dressed like a Jewish villager from Eastern Europe. There’s no time for a redo; Molly brings the exquisite doll into class where a snotty classmate belittles her. Miss Stickley, the kindly teacher, asks Molly if she misunderstood the assignment. Molly explains. The teacher tells the class that Molly and her family are indeed modern-day pilgrims who are escaping prejudice and religious persecution just as those on the Mayflower did.

Even now, after all these years, reading MOLLY’S PILGRIM brings tears to the eyes of this supposedly hard-hearted thriller writer. I love the immigrant story, which --- after all --- is the story of America. The pilgrims who fled first from England on the Mayflower in 1620 were followed by the oppressed from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland in the 19th and early 20th centuries and then in the last generation by refugees from the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, Haiti, China, Somalia, and other countries who come seeking the freedom and opportunity this country has to offer (shame on those politicians who are trying to renege on the promise of what America represents). MOLLY’S PILGRIM reminds us what this country could and should stand for in words that kids grasp and that pierce an adult’s heart.

If you have children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews under nine, read them MOLLY’S PILGRM this Thursday; it’s still in print. Buy a copy for this year and the next, and the next. I’m willing to bet real money your eyes will water at least a little bit while you’re reading the book aloud to any child.


-- Keith Raffel


Can’t get enough of our holiday blogs? Then come back tomorrow as Lisa Scottoline reveals how, after decades of trying, she finally got her mother to pick up a book.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Keith Raffel, Smasher

In a touching anecdote of friendship through the years, Wendy Smith --- author of GIVE A LITTLE: How Your Small Donations Can Transform Our World --- sheds light on just how special a "re-gifted" holiday present can be.


Margie and I were old friends who’d been through a lot together. We met as coworkers, sharing our tremendous love of young children as preschool teachers. We’d each struggled to have children of our own. We both decided to leave our careers to raise them once we were mothers.
We loved visiting one another while our children played, particularly during the holidays. We hung ornaments on one another’s trees, sipped hot chocolate together, and exchanged gifts for the children. Having lost the security of a second income, we were frugal in our gift giving. A box of new crayons was a delight; a package of sparkly stickers was treasured.

One year had been particularly lean for Margie. Still, we gathered for our holiday visit and watched the children open their gifts. Margie gave my twin daughters a beautiful book titled, ONE THE DAY YOU WERE BORN. We shared a love of reading to our children and books were often our gift of choice. Margie told me that her older daughter had loved this book dearly and she believed mine would as well.

Later, after the kids had collapsed in exhaustion and Margie had piled hers into their car and gone home, I paged through the book she’d given my girls. Debra Frasier’s narrative in ON THE DAY YOU WERE BORN is both rhythmic and lyrical, and I knew I’d love reading it over and over.

One day, many months later, I opened the book with pleasure to read it for the umpteenth time, and I found something I had not seen before: On the very first page of the book, before the title page, was an inscription that read “To Tabitha with love from Grandma and Grandpa.”
Margie had given me her daughter's copy of the beloved book, Tabitha having grown into an avid chapter-book reader. I believed then and still do that Margie had forgotten the inscription and given the book as though new. Somehow, this made it all the more precious to me --- a wonderful “re-gifted” treasure.

-- Wendy Smith


Tomorrow, Keith Raffel recounts a Thanksgiving tradition that is sure to touch kids and adults alike.

Labels: Give A Little, holiday-blogs-2009, Wendy Smith

It's almost inevitable that bringing large families together for the holidays will result in chaos, and Edward Falco --- author of SAINT JOHN OF THE FIVE BURROUGHS --- recalls the one Christmas he found the perfect escape from the disorder around him through the pages of a good book.


In my family, growing up in my part of the world --- working class, Italian; Brooklyn, New York, Williamsburg --- we didn’t give each other books for the holidays --- or any other time. The only books in our apartment were, miraculously, a fifty-plus volume set of The Harvard Classics, which my father had purchased decades earlier in an apparent fit of self-improvement, and which had been for many years sitting and gathering dust and mold in a dark corner of the upstairs hallway. I don’t know how old I was when I found these books --- I have a sense of them as having always been there --- but I had been dipping into them and reading here and there for a couple of years before the Christmas Eve I’m remembering, the one when my uncles --- I had seven of them --- decided to shoot out the hanging ornaments on our Christmas tree with the BB gun I’d just been given by my father. I was one of the rare kids in this world who had no interest at all in things like BB guns, and I think that worried my father, which is why he gave me one.

We lived in a two-family house on Ainslie Street, and our living room was below street level with a window that looked out onto a little gated yard set back from a slate sidewalk; we always put the Christmas tree in front of that window so that it showed out festively onto the street. As part of our family’s tradition, we put the children to sleep early and then woke them at midnight to open presents. Whoever thought up this tradition was clearly out of his or her mind since it was nearly impossible for the kids to fall asleep, and when they did, they woke up to find themselves surrounded by adults who had been drinking all night. (Actually, looking back on it, it was usually a lot of fun, though I never even considered adopting the tradition myself once I had my own family.) The Christmas night in question, my father and his brothers were having an especially joyous night with lots of shouting and an occasional fist fight (which was just the natural way of things in a family with eight brothers), and by the time my mother and a cohort of aunts woke up the children, the house was loud with shouting and laughter from the thirty or more aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends crammed into a couple of rooms.

Let’s just say that on that particular Christmas Eve, the gift-giving didn’t go smoothly. I think one of my uncles may have given one of my aunts a gift deemed inappropriate by her husband, something like that --- and let’s just say that the results were…raucous. Things were knocked over. People were carried bodily away. And I, being as I was at the time, an oversensitive ten or eleven year old, found it all at least a little frightening. When I finally got around to opening my BB gun, I remember thinking that I might be able to use it for self-protection; but before I could even get it all unpacked, one of my uncles grabbed it away from me and started shooting out the ornaments on the Christmas tree. And that was when I left the room and slipped out into the quiet of the hallway. I went up to my bedroom, grabbed a blanket from my bed, a flashlight from under the mattress, and then went back out into the dark and cold hallway to snuggle up in quiet corner next to the Harvard Classics, wrapped in my blanket and wielding my flashlight, and read for the first time, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.”

At the time I remember thinking, “This is not so bad: a nice quiet place to sit and read.” I had no idea then what a sconce or a flambeaux was --- or what a cask of Amontillado was, for that matter --- but that was of no concern. At that time, I didn’t know what three-quarters of the things I read about in those books were or meant. The point was not so much what I read but the act of reading itself, which was then and is to this day a wonderful escape from the lunacy of this world and into the lunacy of someone else’s world. But in books, as was not the case in my world, then or now, the craziness was ordered and coherent and meaningful --- and even if I didn’t get most of it, I could still sense all those things, and I was drawn to them powerfully. Still am. And that shaped world of a narrative that exists inside a book? That’s among the best gifts this life has to offer, holidays or otherwise.


-- Ed Falco


Join us again later today as Wendy Smith recalls a Christmas tale of how the act of re-gifting can make a present all the more meaningful.

Labels: Edward Falco, holiday-blogs-2009, Saint John of the Five Burroughs

Oh, the things we do for love.... Today's guest blogger, HUMMINGBIRD author Joshua Gaylord, reminisces about an adolescent crush and the impact of his affections more than 2 decades later.

In the ninth grade, I was in love with my English teacher. Her name was Carol Mooney, and what made her so irresistible was her belief that I was extraordinary --- a delusion which, when I discover it in people around me, never fails to raise them in my estimation. It was one of those classic student-teacher romances. I found reasons to hang out in her classroom before school, after school, during lunch. I offered to help her hang posters of the Transcendentalists on her walls. I made pathetic romantic overtures in my awkward fifteen-year-old way, and she tolerated them with grace and politesse. Far from trying to avoid the label of teacher’s pet among my peers, I flew that flag as though I had battled nations to win it --- and the result was that everyone eventually acquiesced to my right to the title, including Carol Mooney herself.

When Christmas came, she gave me a gift. It wasn’t wrapped, but it was contained in a brown paper bag, the kind I used to bring my lunch to school. Inside I discovered a book, a mass-market paperback copy of William Faulkner’s THE SOUND AND THE FURY. She had inscribed it to me:

for the gothic in you, J. Alden

J. Alden Gaylord was how I liked to think of myself at that age. It was the moniker of a portentous writer, someone who had so many names of such gravity that one of them had to be elided, and I was glad that she was able to appreciate the direction my future would take. I had not known before that I had any gothic in me at all, nor did I quite know what this meant, but I was pleased to discover that I could add this to the gradually accumulating list of things that made up my identity.

“It’s one of my favorite books,” she said, while I turned it over in my hands.

“How come we don’t read it in class?” I asked, suspicious.

“Most ninth-graders aren’t ready for it,” she said.

I took this as a winking acknowledgment that I was better than everyone else in my class, and I winked back. I understood. It would be our secret. We were like secret agents in the service of my awesomeness.

I brought the book home and immediately fell to studying it as though it were the Rosetta Stone of the adult literary world. If I could decipher it, it would be my key to untold poetic wisdom.

The cover showed a mansion on a hill, one of those neoclassical Southern-style homes with six columns in front and a porch balcony on the second story. There was a leafless tree reaching down its claw-like branches over the roof of the mansion, and a sky filled with black clouds that looked like a flight of vengeful specters. The whole picture had a distorted fish-eye quality that I would later come to associate with Thomas Hart Benton. Very sinister all around.

The cover also declared that this version of THE SOUND AND THE FURY was “The Corrected Text,” which made me feel like an aficionado, someone who could appreciate this particular brand of academic-sounding nuance. And the back cover claimed that this was the first “indisputable masterpiece” of this “central figure in twentieth-century literature.”

Surely, what Carol Mooney had given me was not simply a book, but Greatness itself.

The problem was that I could not read it.

What were “curling flower spaces”? What was a “flower tree”? Who were “they,” and what were they hitting? Was Luster really the name of someone? What was going on here?

But this book was meant for me. The inscription by Carol Mooney proved it. So I read it --- in the sense that I put my eyes on every word of every page in that book. I did not understand more than ten percent of it, but I read it in three days and closed it and went around declaring it a masterpiece.

Now, over twenty years later, when I read THE SOUND AND THE FURY, I can proclaim its beauty with a respectable amount of authority, with conviction based upon actual comprehension. But back then what I remember most is believing in the beauty of the book before I had even opened it. It was the gift of Greatness given to me by a person of Greatness, and if I was going to be Great as well, I had better damn well see the beauty in that book. I didn’t actually see it, but I said that I did --- and that was enough to hold me over for a while, until the next time I read it. In my second reading, about a year later, I did actually see a bit more of the beauty, and my blind belief in the book became a little less blind. The next time I saw a little more, and the time after that a little more. And now, twenty years later, I make pilgrimages to Oxford, Mississippi, to visit Faulkner’s grave.

It’s true: I would have taught myself to adore any book Carol Mooney gave me, so I’m grateful she gave me William Faulkner rather than Anthony Trollope. Nonetheless, I sometimes wish I could go back there, wish that Carol Mooney could give me more books, wish that I could read a book with the same religious faith in its greatness that I once did. Not all authors write in the service of their readers’ instant gratification; there are some whose books require a certain blind trust to get you through. Frequently these are the greatest authors, and what may be required is that you pick up the book and hold it to your lips even before you open it, incanting it with your whispered devotion: This book is meant for me, for me. For me.

-- Joshua Gaylord


Check back tomorrow as Edward Falco shares some fond memories of a large, rowdy Christmas, and Wendy Smith gives reflects on what a gift can truly mean to someone.

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009, Hummingbirds, Joshua Gaylord

Kicking off this year's Bookreporter.com Holiday Blog is Beverly Barton, whose latest novel, SILENT KILLER, was recently spotlighted in our Romantic Suspense feature. Below, she discusses one of her most favorite childhood stories and shares how she came to own two equally beloved copies of the timeless fairy tale.


I’m one of those lucky (or depending on your point of view, unlucky) people born at Christmastime, so over the years, many birthday and Christmas presents have been combined into one gift. The year that I turned six, my paternal grandfather gave me an illustrated copy of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, and I honestly don’t remember if the book was one of my birthday presents or one of my Christmas presents. But I do know that this fairy tale about the power of love to transform a beast into a prince became my all-time favorite story, and it opened the world of romance to my young heart and impressionable mind.

Born into a family of storytellers who had the ability to enhance the most mundane aspects of life and turn them into high drama, I quiet easily adopted the theme of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST as my romantic mantra. Unconditional love for another person having the ability to perform a miracle seemed like the perfect romantic formula. From childhood, I have believed that there is no power greater than the power of love --- all types of love, from parental love to wedded bliss, from loving friendships to love of God and country. And when I began writing romance novels, this fairy tale from my childhood formed the basis for many of my bad boy/good girl stories that ended with that essential happily ever after.

Although slightly tattered from much use and the pages yellow with age, that treasured copy of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST given to me so many years ago is still in my possession. It resides in a place of honor on a corner bookcase in my home office, alongside another copy of the book, printed and released the same year as the copy my grandfather gave me. And the interesting tale of how I came to own a second copy is a story of a son’s and daughter’s love for their mother and a son’s determined search for “the perfect gift.” Everyone close to me knows about my favorite fairy tale, knows how much I treasure that book, and knows about the very special relationship I shared with my grandfather. My children have delighted me, surprised me, and brought me to happy tears with numerous thoughtful gifts over the years, but none as absolutely perfect as the second copy of my beloved fairy tale. Two identical Christmas gifts, given decades apart, the first given to a granddaughter, the second given to a mother.

Both copies of this book are important to me, each a gift of love. One from a grandfather I adored and the other from the son and daughter I love unconditionally. The love my grandfather gave me --- which included a book about the power of love --- I gave to my children and they returned that love to me and passed it to their own children, continuing the never-ending circle of love within our family.

-- Beverly Barton


Check back tomorrow as Joshua Gaylord reminisces about how an adolescent crush taught him the importance of having blind trust in unreadable masterpieces.

Labels: Beverly Barton, holiday-blogs-2009, Silent Killer

Last weekend as I was sitting at a panel at the Miami Book Fair, I had this moment where I realized how deeply my life has been enriched by the many authors and readers whom I have met over the last 13 plus years. Sitting with a group of readers in a room listening to an author share her story, there was something really lovely --- and satisfying --- about acknowledging that. It was a revelation of something pretty simple, but I have been thinking about it all week.

Through the years, I have been lucky enough to be able to count so many authors as friends. We have shared anecdotes about our lives, our children and our families. There have been moments of joy and times of loss all shared at readings and conferences, on airplanes, phone calls, and endless emails. We’ve talked knitting, decorating, haircuts, sports and our children’s special moments as much as we have about the stories that they have written.

And when I am in a city that is not home, it’s been wonderful to meet readers. Their suggestions about things to see, places to shop, and things I just cannot miss have given me a very different lens on so many of the places where I have touched down or driven to. Readers’ recommendations of books I “must” read and authors I “need” to explore have expanded my horizons in more ways than I can count. From their suggestions, I have become much more well-read.

There’s this generosity of spirit that I do not take for granted, as I realize it’s pretty special.

As the holidays approach, I am thrilled to share that --- as we did last year --- we will once again be bringing you holiday stories from authors on this blog starting tomorrow that will run right through Christmas Day. There will be pieces about gift giving and getting, bookish tales of the stories that have enhanced their lives and the traditions that they share. I have read some pieces and teared up, laughed and smiled as I read them. I am thrilled that so many authors want to be part of this special celebration of the holiday with us. For me, though they will not be at my holiday table, it will be a chance to spend time with them and celebrate.

Since we cannot all be together, I am glad that you will be able to escape with me and enjoy these moments in the days and weeks ahead. We’ll start tomorrow with Beverly Barton, as she describes two very treasured copies of of the classic fairy tale, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. In the weeks to come, more than 50 authors will be joining us. I hope you end up both discovering an author's work you want to read --- and ideas for bookish giving and getting.

-- Carol Fitzgerald

Labels: holiday-blogs-2009