illustrated by Julian Brazelton
Someone mentioned having borrowed this volume from the library on one of my Christmas groups, which made me curious. I have several collections of Christmas short stories or Christmas books where stories are included, and several are repeated ad infinitum, such as Pearl Buck's "Christmas Day in the Morning," Taylor Caldwell's Christmas story, etc. The copyright on this book is 1936, before most of these repeated stories were written, so when I saw an inexpensive copy of this volume on sale I put in a bid for it.
This is a well-worn copy that someone obviously loved for years. I can imagine someone in the latter years of the Depression or, especially, during World War II, getting some comfort and ideas from its convivial food-and-games section, with its suggestions for playing games like charades (including the very old-fashioned supposition that everyone has an attic filled with old dresses and suits for playing "dress up"). The one thing I was afraid I would get was half of the book being a reprint of A Christmas Carol, but I was pleasantly surprised to find only a read-aloud version (not Dickens' read-aloud version; I could tell from the modern colloquialisms inserted into the 19th-century text!). Appearing was another story I hadn't read in years, "A Candle in the Forest," about a poor family rich in love and the wealthy boy who is drawn to them. (This is a lovely story—I think I originally read it in "Reader's Digest.")
There is also a story about the Christmas Truce of 1914 I had never read before, two different Christmas memoirs by Theodore Roosevelt, one of my favorites: Lincoln Steffen's classic "A Miserable, Merry Christmas," and other vintage stories, poetry, and carols.
The only "fly in the ointment" of this volume is one of those sad little "humorous darky stories" that seemed to be so popular in those days. It is called "How Come Christmas?" and has some little boys and a minister having a rather minstrel-show like discussion of who came first, the Baby Jesus or Santa Claus. The story is, of course, all in dialect. I am not a person of color, so I cannot judge how angry this might make someone. For my part, stories like these from that era make me sad: that otherwise intelligent and creative people could not look beyond the color of someone's skin and see them as equal. I read this story thanking God that, except for a few misguided souls, we have gone beyond "humor" and attitudes of this sort.
A worthwhile volume to find if you are a lover of vintage books.
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