Mrs. Window on the West and I are in our seventies now, but we still continue a tradition begun when our older son was just a toddler. We select a book together, and I read it aloud, usually while she is doing the dishes. It’s sort of like having an audio book, but without the machinery. Also, it’s easier to re-wind.
In December we usually concentrate on Christmas stories, and we just finished (re)reading The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas, by Madeleine L’Engle. She’s best known as the author of A Wrinkle in Time. The slim book we’ve been reading is a family story, of how the family does one special (but simple) Christmas activity each day in December. The plot builds as Christmas, the Christmas Eve pageant, the anticipated birth of a new baby, and a major blizzard all race toward the point where the Austins are.
Tonight we expect to start Anne Perry’s new seasonal book, A Christmas Legacy. But those aren’t really childhood fare, so in case you have kids at home I thought we might look at some more full-family books, starting with one that has deep roots in our region.
Julia Sauer was born in Rochester, and she died in Rochester, and she went to the University of Rochester, and she headed up the children’s department (1921-1958) at Rochester’s public library. For decades she’s been slowly fading from memory, which is tragic, for her juvenile novel Fog Magic is an overlooked classic that explores the porous bundary between present and past, fantasy and reality, natural and supernatural.
But we’re looking today at her slim juvenile novel The Light at Tern Rock. On the surface it’s a simple tale of an old woman, who spent most of her life at an isolated lighthouse, agreeing to tend the light for a few days so that the current keeper can make a family visit ashore. Before long the widowed woman and her orphaned grandson realize that they’ve been deliberately marooned on Tern Rock, not just over Christmas, but actually BECAUSE it’s Christmas. They have to deal not just with the fact of their circumstances, but with their own emotions and reactions. It’s a rough story in some ways, a story of loss as well as finding, but one that can touch readers or listeners, and linger for a lifetime.
If Julia Sauer is fading from memory, Frances Frost is already gone, having died of cancer 62 years ago, at the age of 53. She published almost 30 books, and the 49 libraries of our Southern Tier Library System have exactly five copies under her name.
As Julia Sauer was a lifelong Rochestrian, Frances Frost was a Vermonter from cradle to grave. Sleigh Bells for Windy Foot opens with a man setting up the village Christmas tree, and laconically mentioning that he had lost his son in the war. (This was published in 1948.) From there the story is the story of farm boy Toby, with his family, his friends, and his Shetland pony, enjoying the Vermont winter and getting ready for Christmas. There’s snow to ski in, and to sleigh in, deer to admire, gifts to make. It’s a breath of cold clear Vermont air. Yes, there are troubles aplenty in the world, but now and then you get a season of grace.
Frederick Forsythe is noted for (and has made fortunes on) novels overflowing with assassins, explosions, betrayals, and ticking time bombs. He also wrote The Shepherd, about a cold dark Christmas Eve, and a British fighter jet pilot lost, with his instruments and his radio dead, above the utterly indifferent North Sea. And it’s about another pilot, in an obsolete aircraft, who finds him and leads him home.
Perhaps the first Christmas novel of all, of course, was A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. He wrote it in six weeks, but the unoptimistic publishers didn’t get the first run of 6000 copies on the stalls until December 19. And every one was gone by Christmas Eve. The novel was still being invented back in 1843, so your kids need to be able to work with convoluted sentences and a decided lack of action. But this is where it all started! It’s worth re-reading!