Christmas Books

I was arranging my Christmas books this morning and concluded I needed to post an article I wrote eight years ago about favorite Christmas books. Happily, I still enjoy Christmas books and our family books remain the same. Sadly, of those mentioned in the article, only the Stornettas (excepting Nathan), Debra Ames, the Goulds and the Linsenmeyer's remain in New Jersey. (I've cut it from a previous document and am having trouble getting the format just right. Apologies--but I have too many Christmas tasks to fiddle with it anymore.)

It all started with the Grinch. Not only was it my son Nathan’s first Christmas, but our first Christmas in our first home in New Jersey. No longer students, we could afford to buy our first Christmas book, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, a childhood favorite of my husband Scott. The next year, we bought The Polar Express and the Stornetta holiday tradition was born: a new Christmas book every year.  

A simple tradition. (A bit like my father's tradition of buying my mother a rose for every year they had been married. It works great when you are in the single digits, but gets a bit more complicated and expensive when you are trying to explain that you want 37, yes, 37, not three dozen red roses delivered.) That is it was a simple tradition until the year Daniel’s teacher asked me to bring in a favorite Christmas story that explained Christmas. (Daniel attended a multi-cultural school with more children who did not celebrate Christmas than those who did.) I panicked. I realized I did not have a single Christmas book that accurately explained the birth of Christ. I was tempted to bring in A Night without Darkness, but I did not want to confuse the few Christian children in the class with a Nephite version of Christmas.  To the bookstore I went. I corrupted our simple tradition by returning home with a few more books than usual. And in twenty-five years, our collection has grown; at last count there were nearly one hundred holiday books, including two in Spanish, one in French as well as one about Kwanza, three about Hanukkah.

 

An important part of our Christmas book tradition is drinking hot chocolate and reading a book each night. My children are now busy with school and other activities, and we no longer have time to read a story each night.  But we still manage to squeeze in a few stories each year. We still all fondly remember Nathan’s rendition of The Grinch in Spanish several years ago, even if he was the only Spanish-speaker in our home.

As I considered our tradition, I was curious about Christmas traditions of other ward members.  So I called up a few ward members. I decided to start small, so I focused on Christmas story traditions only. Many had well-established story traditions. Several ward members also mentioned favorite movies. 

When I asked Linda White, there was no hesitation.  Her family reads A Christmas Dress for Ellen*, a true story first told by President Monson at the First presidency Christmas Devotional in 1997. Every Christmas Eve, her family reads the story about the mother of a destitute farm family in Alberta, Canada, who goes to bed on Christmas Eve saddened because she has nothing for her five children. It appears that her letters for help to her sisters in Idaho have gone unanswered. But George Schow, their mailman, braves the coming storm and bitter cold to deliver a Christmas miracle. 

Prominent on Debra Ames’ book shelf is The Forgotten Carols by Michael McLean. McLean wrote the book as a framework for several of his own Christmas carols, songs from the perspective of characters such as the innkeeper who turned the young couple away or the shepherd who slept through the angel's announcement. Every year, Debra  reads the book while listening to the carols. The story is about a nurse whose empty life is changed by her patient, John, who expands her understanding of Christmas, by introducing her to “The Forgotten Carols." 

Nancy Halterman was a little flustered when I asked her about her favorite Christmas book. Her family has about five they like to read each year. Forced to choose just one, Nancy chose The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, a favorite also mentioned by Kerrie Samuels.  Jonathan Toomey, the best woodcarver in the valley, is always alone and never smiles. No one knows really understands that his is still mourning the loss of his wife and child.  The miracle begins one early winter's day, when a widow and her young son approach him with a gentle request. 

In a display of loyalty, Jonathan Linton mentioned The Christmas Box (and it’s sequel, The Christmas Box Timepiece) as one of his favorite Christmas stories. (Jonathon has illustrated three of author Richard Paul Evans children’s books.) The story about a young couple, Richard (who narrates) and Keri, who accept a position to care for a lonely widow, Mary Parkin, in her spacious Victorian mansion, was a national best-seller. Their tender relationships, fraught with real-life struggles, are the backdrop for unraveling a mysterious secret that gently propels the reader through this short story. 

When I asked Jonathan if there were any childhood favorites whose illustrations he enjoyed, he mentioned two:  Norman Rockwell’s Christmas Book and Jolly Old Santa Claus. The first book, put together by Molly Rockwell, a granddaughter-in-law to the illustrator, combines Norman Rockwell’s Christmas illustrations with Christmas carols, stories, poems and recollections. There are 83 full color and 12 black and white plates of Rockwell’s illustrations and excerpts from such authors as Shakespeare, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Ogden Nash.  

 

The second book is a complete collection of Santa paintings by German-born artist George Hinkle. The classically trained artist illustrates Santa’s preparations for Christmas and his travel on Christmas Eve in beautiful oil paintings. The book, which was first published in 1961, is now available in an anniversary reprint. Jonathon notes the reprint is not quite as good as the original.  

According to Andrew Croshaw, their family reading tradition started quite by accident.  When they were first married, they were given Boyd K. Packer’s A Christmas Parable as a stocking stuffer. When Christmas was over, the book got packed away with their Christmas decorations. So each year when they unpack their Christmas box, they read President Packer’s story of a man whose strange dream during a difficult Christmas season awakens him to the reality of the Savior's atonement. 

Laura Wardle’s favorite story is also one of my favorites, A Christmas Memory, a memoir of Truman Capote. The seven-year-old narrator and his “friend,” a distant, eccentric, elderly cousin prepare several dozen fruitcakes and mail them to people they admire. Gathering the pecans from those left behind in the harvest, buying illegally made whiskey for soaking the cakes, cutting their own tree, and decorating it with homemade ornaments are some of the adventures the two share. This book is a companion piece to Capote’s The Thanksgiving Visitor, his memoir of inviting the class bully to Thanksgiving dinner.

Sheyrl Neville listed Christmas Oranges, a tale about an orphan who is punished on Christmas day and denied the orange she had been anticipating for weeks.  Her miracle is how the other children help her get the treat. After describing the book, however, Sheyrl confessed it was not books, but Christmas movies she loved at this time of year. Both Bishop Gould and Kerrie Samuels expressed the same sentiment. 
 

The Stornetta family favorites? Scott has The Grinch who Stole Christmas practically memorized. My favorite?  Christmas Day in the Morning, a beautifully illustrated version of Pearl S. Buck’s story found in many Primary manuals about a boy who rises extra early to do his father's biggest chore, the milking.  Chrissy has already claimed our copy of The Polar Express.  She crayoned her name, complete with a backward ‘s’ inside the front cover years ago. (She refuses to see the movie for fear it has corrupted her childhood story.) Nathan’s favorite is Santa Calls, a clever story about Santa helping a young girl solve her sibling rivalry problems. (It became his favorite at a time he felt overshadowed by his sister.) Daniel likes all of our favorites as well as Auntie Claus, a delightful story about the sister of Santa Claus.

When I questioned a few ward members, they gave me a strange stare and paused for an awkward moment before they suggested that the scriptural accounts of Christ’s birth were their required holiday reading.  These ward members reminded me of Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas who conveys the strength, beauty, and simplicity of Christ’s birth in his recitation of Christ’s birth from Luke.  Like Linus, Billie Eckert gets her Christmas spirit from the scripture accounts. Or as Dottie Linsenmeyer noted that although she likes Dicken’s A Christmas Carol because it “captures a lot of the Christmas spirit,” Luke 2 is her favorite Christmas story. Bishop Gould’s family uses the scriptures as a basis for a small family enactment of the Christ’s birth each year.

So there you have it:  a small, informal, by no means complete report of some of the Christmas reading traditions of some Morristown ward members.  
 

* Plagiarism note:  Most of the book descriptions above are not original. I have taken them from book flaps or summaries of the books by journals.  Most descriptions of the movies come from imdb.com.

Favorite Christmas Stories of Morristown, New Jersey Ward Members (2005)

Bethers, Linda.  Christmas Oranges.  Illustrated by Ben Sowards.  American Fork, Utah:  Covenant Communications, Inc:  2002.

Buck, Pearl S.  Christmas Day in the Morning. Illustrated by Mark Buehner. New York:  Harper Collins Publishers, 2002. 

Capote, Truman. A Christmas Memory. Illustrated by Beth Peck. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1989.

Evans, Richard Paul. The Christmas Box. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Joyce, William. Santa Calls. New York: A Laura Geringer Book, 1993.  

McLean, Michael. The Forgotten Carols. Rev ed. Salt Lake City, Utah: Shadow Mountain, 2003.

Monson, Thomas S.  A Christmas Dress for Ellen. Illustrated by Ben Sowards. Salt Lake City, Utah:  Deseret Book, 2004.

Packer, Boyd K. A Christmas Parable. 2^nd ed. Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1993.  

Primavera, Elise. Auntie Claus. New York: Silver Whistle, 1998.

Robinson, Timothy.  A Night without Darkness:  A Nephite Christmas Story. Illustrated by Jim Madsen.  Salt Lake City:  Deseret Book, 1999.

Rockwell, Molly. Norman Rockwell’s Christmas Book. New York: Abrams, 1977.

Suess, Dr.  How the Grinch Stole Christmas. New York:  Random House, 1957.

------.  Como El Grinch Robo La Navidad!  Trans. Yanitzia Canetti.   New York: Lectorum Publications, Inc., 2000.

Tonn, Mary Jane.  Jolly Old Santa Claus. Nashville, Tennessee: Ideal Publishers, Inc., 1996.

Van Allsburg, Chris. The Polar Express. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1985.

Wojciechowski, Susan. The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey. Illustrated by   P.J. Lynch.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 1995.