Ending With "Ideals"

Ideals Christmas 2023, from Ideals Publications
What more can I say about these pretty books containing poetry, essays, and artwork/photographs? They are definitely a cozy "go to" during the Christmas season: the nostalgic soft-focus vintage paintings, the still-life items of Christmas decorations, the annual narrative of the Nativity story with appropriate artwork, etc. This issue had an inordinate amount of verse that were Christmas carol words, but it didn't take away from my enjoyment.

One of my favorite poems, "Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913" by Robert Bridges (turned into a song for John Denver so long ago) appears in the volume. I also liked the short but joyful "Christmas" by Marchette Chute.

As always, Pamela Kennedy's essays are a joy; I remember back when she was writing these about her children, and now she's writing them about her grandchildren. The Dickens essay was thoughtful, and also Bennett's history of St. Nicholas.

This is an annual treat. And that's it for this year's Christmas books. I'm still working my way through Flame Tree Press' huge collection of "gothic" Christmas fantasy short stories, mixing vintage offerings like Dickens' "The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton" with modern ones.

On the Eve of Twelfth Night

Christmas in Puerto Rico, from World Book, Inc.

Well, this is it. With this volume, I've finished my collection of World Book's "Christmas Around the World" books, started way back when I came upon at least a dozen of them at the Cobb County Library Sale (and found most of them there later. This one, however, came via online.

It's a colorful volume packed with all the unique celebrations that come from Puerto Rico's mixed heritage of Native forebears, Spanish explorers, and being a commonwealth of the United States, so that Christmas trees, snowmen, and Santa cavort in the tropical sun along with poinsettias, palm trees, and cactus decorated with colored lights, not to mention roosters for the one who supposedly crowed at midnight when Jesus was born. Special foods, like lechon (roast pork) and pasteles, are served, music is heard everywhere played on the unique 10-stringed guitar and unique Puerto Rican carolers fill the streets.

There are pull-outs about Jose Feliciano and "Feliz Navidad," a portrait of a "santero," a carver of saints, and others, and a big section on the big celebration in the country, Three Kings Day on January 6, the feast of the Epiphany.

Christmas As It Was

A Shropshire Christmas, compiled by Lyn Briggs

I found my first volume of the Sutton "Christmas anthologies" (A Worcestershire Christmas, if you care) at a library book sale many years back. When A Surrey Christmas turned up at a subsequent sale I realized this was a series. Every time I found a book from this series, I bought one and have now managed to accumulate all of the regional ones. These 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.

Like A Hertfordshire Christmas previously reviewed, this one is a bumper issue of old Christmas lore, mostly of Christmas as it was celebrated from 1850 through the 1970s, and little repeated material as in a few of the other books. Shropshire is on the border of England and Wales, and contains such famous cities as Shrewsbury, Telford, Ludlow, and Ellesmere, and several famous writers and artists came from the area, including A.E. Housman, poet; Wilfred Owen, World War I author and poet; and Randolph Caldecott, artist. (The Shire in The Lord of the Rings is reportedly based on Shropshire and Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mystery stories are set in Shrewsbury.) Housman, Caldecott, and Cadfael are all represented in this collection, and the famous Dick Whittington, "three times Mayor of London," supposedly was a "Salopian boy." ("Salop" is the ancient name for the Shropshire region.)

But the best bits in this book are just regular reminisces from "regular people": from creeping downstairs to find apples, nuts, an orange, and small toys in your stocking to the windows of the poulterers' shops filled with all sorts of geese, turkeys, and other game to carols born in the Shropshire hills to the story of a servant married (but not living with) a wealthy man obsessed with servants to homely Christmas celebrations in cottagers' huts and middle-class homes.

Is There a Santa Claus?

'Twas the Night Before, Jerry B. Jenkins

Tom Douton is a self-made journalist with a knack of writing cynical stories about the victimized "little people" in life. Noella Wright is an optimistic university journalism instructor. When these two opposites meet, they unexpectedly fall in love. Noella doesn't understand his cynicism, nor does Tom understand her happy outlook to life; they just know they're happy together.

But Tom doesn't know the complete story behind the round pendant Noella wears all the time, one with an incised Christmas tree shape and the words "Forever and..." The only time he asked, she merely said "Santa brought it to me." But the truth is much more complicated than Tom knows, and he doesn't know how to react to it.

He only knows it has made a rift between himself and Noella, so he makes a decision that will change his life.

This was a sweet little book with a twist at the end I didn't expect; it turns very suddenly from a love story between two dissimilar people and becomes something unexpected. However, I thought the writing was a bit...distant. Tom and Noella never really came alive for me, although Tom's adventure at the end was well-written.

Decades of Christmas

A Hertfordshire Christmas, compiled by Margaret Ashby

I found my first volume of the Sutton "Christmas anthologies" (A Worcestershire Christmas, if you care) at a library book sale many years back. When A Surrey Christmas turned up at a subsequent sale I realized this was a series. Every time I found a book from this series, I bought one and have now managed to accumulate all of the regional ones. These 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.

Some of the books repeat certain things heavily, like the "St. George and the Dragon" skit done door-to-door by the Waits, or excerpts from Dickens, so it was refreshing to find this one, which is pretty much wall-to-wall memoirs from former Hertfordshire writers and residents, and they run the gamut from poulterers' shops in the late 1880s to memories of the cold, cold winter of 1962: from a story about an orphan put out for fostering by an old couple to a Christmas selection by Anthony Trollope, from wartime Christmases during both World Wars to celebrations in school, memories of composer Elizabeth Poston to one from Charles Dickens' great-granddaughter Monica, reports from department stores and ghost stories and bookmobiles, and more.

I really enjoyed this one because of the different decades of memories throughout, and, as always, the reminders of how little it took one hundred years ago to make a small child's Christmas.