A Cathedral Miracle, A Donkey's Tale, and More

A Cheshire Christmas, compiled by Alan Brack

This is another of Alan Sutton publishing's "Christmas Anthologies," which contain short excerpts of Christmas/Christmastide passages from various British novels, memoirs, and poetry books, with the action taking place in the shire or historical era denoted in the title.

This volume has more "real life" excerpts from diaries/books than usual, and doesn't repeat the usual "mummer's play" scripts as some of the other volumes do. The first essay is about owning a turkey farm that supplies free-range birds for the holidays. There are also an encounter with a ghosts at an old estate, a woman's memories of Christmas at the family's country house, an amusing narrative of an 82-year-old man who goes hunting on Boxing Day and ends up having to be extricated from the mud where he was trapped under his horse (the horse came out okay, too!), the story of a supposed "miracle of light" at Chester Cathedral during a sermon and what really happened, a fictional tale of two feuding families and how the sickness of one family's baby brought the feud to an end, several lively Christmas poems (one told from the POV of the donkey who carried Mary to Bethlehem) as well as one very lugubrious one about the mortality of man for New Year's Eve, and even two excerpts by Americans: a diary entry from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who spent an English Christmas in 1854, and passages from Washington Irving's "Old Christmas" section of The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. Elizabeth Gaskell of Cranford fame is represented, as well as Lewis Carroll, whose "Christmas Greetings," the original inscription for his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is reprinted.

All in all a nice selection for bedtime reading before Christmas!