Spend the Holidays With Pearl Buck

Once Upon a Christmas, Pearl S. Buck
I picked this up at a used book sale noticing it had the essay "Nineteen Stockings by the Chimneypiece," which was reprinted in "Reader's Digest" for so many years, and figured it would also have Buck's most famous Christmas story of all, "Christmas Day in the Morning," about the teenage boy who devises a novel gift for his father. To my surprise it is not in this volume, which is a combination of essays by Buck about various Christmases in her lifetime and short stories she wrote, including "Christmas Miniature," about a little boy who sneaks downstairs on Christmas morning, just to see if Santa has been, you understand, and ends up saving a very small life; "The New Christmas," in which a family of seven discovers a "new" kind of Christmas when it looks like they won't have any money for a big celebration; and "The Christmas Secret," about a couple who has adopted a Vietnamese child of mixed ancestry (this one annoyed me a little, as the couple appeared to be protecting a man who came off as a jerk, but which I believe was Buck's intent).

I loved both stories and essays, but found the latter fascinating learning more about Buck's life as the child of missionaries in China (missionaries who did not believe that the Chinese they were living among were "heathens" or not as good as white people). Her story about the Christmas they didn't celebrate because they were too busy keeping Chinese refugees from starving, or about the Chinese boy who turned up at their doorstep and whom they adopted, or about their almost being murdered when the Japanese invaded Nanking were quite affecting. My favorite essay was "Thoughts of a Woman at Christmas," which begins as an essay about Joseph and turns into one about feminism, and something I've been thinking for years, that the reason men want to entrap women behind veils or under burkas, or abuse them and abuse children, is that there are too many men who are really afraid of women, that a woman being as intelligent as they are or as strong as they are somehow demeans their manhood. Back in the 1950s, Buck was writing about issues that still trouble us today: equality between the sexes and equality between the races, and her anger about the injustices of mixed-race adoption are those I remember from Helen Doss' The Family Nobody Wanted.

As a bonus this volume contains pencil illustrations by Donald Lizzul. Worth your while.