Category Archives: Reading

About Hatchet

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One of the good things about homeschooling my kids was that I sort of taught myself how to become a teacher. I never wanted to teach other people’s kids but I loved mine enough to give it a shot. Lucky for me, there were a lot of people who paved the way ahead of me and freely passed out the keys to providing kids with a decent education.

Of course, I have always thought that books were pretty foundational. Not necessarily textbooks, which while providing a framework for progressivity, could also be like eating dry toast for breakfast. Every. Day. How happy was I to learn that much of what we had to cover in Social Studies or Language Arts or Science could be found in Living Books. Meaning real stories written by real people. Even Math could be dissected by picture books and History plumbed with a great novel.

My love of literature started a long time ago in the basement of our farmhouse where an odd assortment of books had collected on the shelves. There were outdated textbooks, some Pulitzer Prize winners, MAD magazine digests, and the first kid’s books I knew. I suspected that The Cat in the Hat Comes Back was a sequel by its title, but as it was the only one we had, it was the only Dr. Suess that I knew. Homer Price, The House at Pooh Corner, The Middle Sister, The Big Wave, The Magic Tunnel populated the shelves, as well as a few of the Thornton W. Burgess, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Hardy Boys and Donna Parker series.

The only library in our little town was in the Derwent school and because I showed so much enthusiasm for reading, the librarian soon let me look at the book catalogs that came across her desk and asked for my suggestions when it came to spending your hard-earned tax dollars for our little library collection. How cool was that?

What I didn’t realized was that some of the best descriptions, especially for books that graced the covers of the catalogs and the tops of the pages, were for award winning books. I never paid attention when I was in school to the gold stickers that were on the front of Really Good Books: the Caldecott Award and the John Newbery. Fast forward to the early 2000s, when I started reading How to Homeschool books in earnest, I discovered that there were many more of these magical lists, these Good Books that would not only entertain me my children, but teach them Very Good Things, too.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was one of those Good Books. Between the lines of a story of parents getting divorced, the protagonist Brian Robeson boards a plane at the beginning of summer break to go see his father who now lives in Canada, somewhere remote enough that a two-seater plane is the method of transport. As if just being a zit-spackled teenager caught in between your parents isn’t bad enough, Brian’s pilot suffers a heart attack and they plummet to the ground to their death. The End.

Just kidding. Brian (but not the pilot) survives the crash and he is pitted against the wilderness, desperately trying to stay alive until somebody can find him, like a needle in a stack of needles. All The Bad Wilderness Things happen to him: hunger, cold, rain, mosquitoes, moose attacks, nightmares about the dead pilot coming to get him, but somehow Brian uses his wits to figure out How to Do Everything With Only A Hatchet.

The Hatchet was a gift his mother gave him before he left which he luckily wore on his belt, surviving along with Brian when the plane, dead pilot and Everything Else That Would Have Been Useful wind up at the bottom of the lake. It turns out to be the key to everything in Brian’s survival.

Brian’s story – parts of which are based on the author’s real experiences living rugged in the bush – was so “enchanting” to Paulsen’s readers that they wrote to him and demanded: More Brian! And so Paulsen gave his adoring public more. The Hatchet series includes The River, Brian’s Winter, Brian’s Hunt, and Brian’s Return, all nice neat little books that you could read in a few hours or find as an audiobook at your local library read by Peter Coyote.

With the Brian books, I can vicariously survive with him in the woods because I have no intention of EVER getting stranded in the wilderness, in Vermilion Provincial Park or even in my backyard. I’m not exactly what you would call a gamer when it comes to the Great Outdoors. I prefer My Outdoors to be 20 above and wind-less, with a cooler of hot dogs and coolers on the deck and a warm bed awaiting me inside four walls. With electricity. And bug spray. No moose.

But.

The Brian Books remind me that with a little bit of ingenuity, we humans can survive a lot, almost anything really. We only need to look back at the last few months when we were first tossed into the COVID-a-tron to know that we can put up with a lot. And sometimes the way to get through the next unknown is to remember what you have already done. Brian, via Paulsen, returned to the woods again and again, because he knew he COULD do it again. And the last time, he did take bug spray.

About Clarence the TV Dog

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There are some books that were a part of my childhood that I just cannot shake. Perhaps it was because I read it a zillion (and a half) times or maybe it was because the name Clarence, for a dog, is kinda memorable. Especially because – spoiler alert! – Clarence turns out to be a girl, delivering a litter of puppies at the end of the book. At any rate, the story I most remember from this particular book – which, alas, I no longer own – isn’t about the dog or the TV or even about his (er, her) adoptive family which included tweens Brian and Sis.

No, the most memorable story (for me) had to do with a certain less-than-favorite spinster aunt who injected herself into the family for an extended visit. (And in all honesty, I’m not sure if this chapter is from this book or the end-of-your-seat sequel: Clarence Goes to Town.)

Aunt Spinster was a fifties stereotype of the unmarried, unattractive, unmarriageable woman: a bossy, angular know-it-all – at least, this was the kind of nemesis character that populated children’s books. And most definitely she did not approve of Clarence. Dogs, and children, were to be seen and not heard. Dogs should not watch television or act like humans. And most definitely, dogs (or children) should not mess with skunks.

Except Clarence does mess with a skunk. And you know what sort of havoc and misery that can cause.

Up until the skunk debacle, Brian and Sis have been harangued by their Aunt – not only is she always telling them what to do or what to think, she tells them how to do it or how to think it. Her accomplice in her mean knowledge is a mysterious Everything Book – some sort of mystical encyclopedia that Aunt S carries with her everywhere and consults constantly and religiously. The proper temperature to cook chicken? The capital city of Eritrea? The etymology of the word etymology? All of this seemed to be at her fingertips with a flip through her Everything Book. Sort of like Pre-Google.

For Brian and Sis, harangued to an inch of their lives, their collaborative solution seems like it would be obvious: Find the Book. Destroy the Book. But no, the siblings just want to get their hands on it so that they can get their own copy of said book and start beating their aunt at her game, looking up the answers and ringing in before she does. I’ll take ‘Famous Know-It-Alls and Their Comeuppance’ for $2000.00, Alex.

When they finally do manage to send their aunt on some urgent mission sans book, they page through only to find out that it’s not a book: it’s a scrapbook, a compendium of curiosities cobbled from newspapers and copied from books.

Oh, how I wanted a book like that.

Maybe that’s what sent me down the scrapbook-making quest I have been on since I was a tween myself. Partly a thirst for wanting to know All The Things and partly a love for pasting things into books, I have been creating my own Everything Books for years. Sometimes I call them Art Journals or Junk Journals or Just Journals with Extra Bits of Goodness Stuck Inside Them, but all of them are basically my attempt to save everything, know everything (at least the stuff I want to know) and remember everything.

This blog, I have realized has become a new kind of Art/Junk/Everything Journal for me. And bonus, it’s highly searchable, with a flick of my fingertips just as Aunt S would do when I want to look up something that I want to remember.

Of course, Bossy Aunt Saves the Day, consulting her book and instructing the kids in how to bathe Clarence in tomato juice to rid him of his/her skunky odor. And they decide (as she’s packing up to leave) that maybe she and her book have some value after all.

About The Big Wave

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Before I ever understood anything about Pulitzers or Nobel Prizes, I read the slim book The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck, who incidentally clocked in with both of those honors. So, it is no small thing when a writer of such caliber chooses to write for children, which, despite the heavy content, this book is written for. That being said, I think adults can always benefit from reading good children’s stories.

Kino, the son of a farmer, lives near a Japanese fishing village where his best friend Jiya works with his fisherman father. Tragedy visits when a tsunami wipes out the village even though The Old Gentleman who lives in a castle up the mountain offers refuge at the first signs of danger. Jiya alone, sent by his father, manages to get up the mountain in time and then watches with Kino as the terrible ocean wipes the beach clean.

Years later, Jiya decides to return to the beach, to help rebuild the village and to become a fisherman like his father. Kino is baffled with Jiya’s decision and The Old Gentleman derides those who have started the rebuilding. He warns them that he will never again offer refuge in his castle, what he claims is the only safe place.

Jiya answers him:

“Your castle is not safe either…If the earth shakes hard enough, your castle will crumble, too. There is no refuge for us who live on these islands. We are brave because we must be.”

In some ways, this pandemic has felt like The Big Wave – sweeping, arbitrary and devastating. Many people have died and our way of life has changed in somewhat drastic ways. It’s easy to feel like it will never be the same again. It’s easy to be afraid of The Big Wave, of The Next Wave.

In a podcast I recently listened to, Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) talks with Jen Hatmaker about this feeling of shock that people have – like they’re suddenly out of control, when in fact they were never in control. As Liz puts it, “The world is doing what our world does. The world is just being itself…and it’s doing it perfectly. Because what the world does is change every second…And that’s what it’s always done.”

I take great comfort in those words, which to me paradoxically echo those in Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.” The world does what the world does – as it always has. We were never in control. But we can be brave because we must be.

And though it feels like things may never be the same, we won’t go backward. We aren’t meant for that. We are meant to go back to the beach and build again. And to treasure what we have, if only for this day.

About Me and Books

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There’s a lot of talk about minimalism and tiny houses these days. Generally, I figure that most people who choose to live in a tiny house probably don’t have much stuff to begin with. Or they’re just not that materialistic. They’re outdoorsy, probably, and live in warm climates. They entertain only small parties, if any, because they only own 2 plates and 2 forks and one knife. And they seem to have a romantic idea about sleeping on plywood beds in treehouse style loft bedrooms conducive to hitting your head if you suddenly sit up.

I’ve watched a few of those shows and frankly, it just looks too much like camping to me. Tiny bathrooms where you can sit on the toilet to shower (not a high-value efficiency for me), steps that hide dog dishes (because tiny house people always have room for the largest dogs), shoe storage that doubles as art installations – all these things look nice – in theory. For reals, I’d like to see the stats on how long before these tiny house owners put their digs up for sale on Kijiji.

Maybe the only ones that pique my interest are the tiny-house-book-lovers. You know, people who basically build themselves a self-sufficient closet to hold all their best friends – er, favorite books. Books as art installations? That I understand.

However, as a bookishly nerdy person whose favorite activities all center around words, I don’t have as many books as you might think. Oh sure, I have plenty, more than the average book-bear probably. But I actually don’t have a problem with getting rid of books if – IF – they no longer serve me.

I think my purging prowess started when we moved for the fourth time in the first seven years of being married and I lifted a box heavy with university textbooks that had not been unpacked from the previous move. What purpose did it serve me to save my Microbiology textbook from my ill-fated first year of nursing school? When would I need to urgently look up how a virus evolves the life span of a paramecium? And given constant scientific research and updating, how could I ever know if my textbook would stay “right”? And finally, I never really read it in the first place. Microbiology, Biology, Zoology – all the science-y textbooks – are long gone. And I never missed them.

I started my theory of decluttering before the internet became a THING – when copious amounts of unreliable information were available on the Google – in mere seconds. Way back then, my first criterion for letting go of a book was: Can I find this at the library? Oh, sure, it’s nice to have something around sometime just because you like a subject. Case in point: I never did let go of my Art History textbook from 1988 and I still look things up in it. Because I’m interested in art, especially old art, for which there’s not a lot of new research being dug up, archaeologically speaking. And, in my opinion, an art history textbook makes a nicer coffee table book than Physics, a textbook I also never read but which additionally gives me the heebie-jeebies.

This brings up my second criterion, which was to honestly ask myself: will I ever actually read this – again or for the first time? When I first started homeschooling my boys, I supplemented our bookshelves by haunting garage sales and second-hand stores. I bought anything and everything that looked educational, classic or fun. The result was bookshelves overflowing with many, many unread books. While it served us well to have lots to choose from, I was again confronted with this problem when staging a house to sell. Rather than box up the bulk and shove it under the stairs, I purged again – this time, asking myself the hard questions like: Will I ever read The Count of Monte Cristo or Mein Kampf or HTML for Dummies? Yeah, no.

But that’s me. Physics and HTML might be your perfect bookshelf fodder. And maybe at one time, it was for me, too. On a podcast that I listened to this morning about this subject, the guest talked about letting go of the things that are “no longer you” – which is sometimes hard to do. But she also said that she trusted herself to remember what was important. The result is a lot more room in your brain to focus on what’s here and now. And maybe a lot more room on your bookshelves.

These days, I try to “preview” books before I ever buy them – meaning I use the library again, a lot. There’s nothing worse than spending $30 on a book that you open up and say, “Oh no.” Of course, COVID-19 has made using the library a little different (hurry up, Phase Two!) but in the meantime, I’m shopping my own shelves for reading material. Because I still have books I have to read. And plenty more to give away.

About The Martian

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So I read another book last week. (Cue the horns.)

There’s actually a lot of book reading going on in my house these COVID-19 days. Gil reads regularly, like me, but Rick has definitely upped his game, probably due in part to hearing Gil and me talking about our books all the time.

Gil and I have been having an ongoing conversation about the merits of the Fantasy genre. He schools me about low fantasy (or “low-nerd”) and high fantasy (“high-nerd”, obviously). I insist I don’t like fantasy literature (remember my book club debacle?) and then he points out all the fantasy books I have read (and loved): Harry Potter, Narnia…ummm…yup, I think that’s it. There are only so many unicorns I can handle.

Those favorites would make me a low nerd.

But every once in a while, I up my nerd game and read some science fiction, like this week’s choice, The Martian. It’s actually pretty rare that I read an novel after I have already seen the movie, but my reading guru, Anne Bogel of Modern Mrs. Darcy, insisted it was a brilliant read whether you were a high nerd, low nerd or none of the above. I had really enjoyed the movie, so I had to wonder, what more could the book offer me?

As it turns out, plenty. Like how to survive single-handedly ON MARS – a good skill for anyone’s toolbox. Well, okay, maybe not applicable to most people. But the cool thing about author Andy Weir is that he makes it seem absolutely plausible that it could be done by an ordinary astronaut like Mark Watney (who looks exactly like Matt Damon, so that does tip the balance a little.) His title character is funny, irreverent, oddly optimistic, forgiving, intelligent and most important for being stranded on Mars, he can fix pretty much anything. And his problem-solving skills are killer.

What draws me to a book like this? Well, for one, the science is actually pretty interesting. Weir makes it read like a Reader’s Digest and not a Chilton’s car repair manual. And while I don’t actually like doing science, I do like knowing about it. Weir had real-live astronauts read his book and give it a thumbs up. If it’s good enough for Canadian Chris Hadfield, it’s good enough for me. I do like books that teach me something.

At times, I actually forgot that I was reading a novel. Hmm, interesting. That underscores another winning factor for me – a book that transports me. In this case, metaphorically to Mars. And, very convincingly, with its descriptions of freezing temperatures and lonely days eating freeze-dried snacks – not unlike COVID-19 until spring decided to show up. And also, whether it’s sci-fi or fantasy or whatever, it has to be believable – not in the “I-believe-in-unicorns” sense but in the “If someone got stranded on Mars, this is exactly how we would spend a couple billion dollars getting him back.” Sometimes, I actually believe Mark Watney lived. In the future. It’s THAT convincing.

A book gets bonus points if it can make me LOL, which this one did, several times. Author Andy is apparently pretty funny because the wisecracks are pretty much what he would say in the same situation, he demurs in the interview at the back of this book. I mean, if I want to not laugh, I can borrow a Chilton manual from my father-in-law.

One caveat: the f-bombs abound right from the first sentence. I find it makes the writing effective. But if it bothers you, you can pretend that Weir is British. Almost everything can be forgiven in the right accent.

About the Austins

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And now back to our regular un-Pandemic programming. Sort of.

I’m reading a lot lately. I mean, I always have one or two or three books on the go but Pandemic reading has taken on a new slant: my library and favorite thrift shop are closed, I hate e-Readers and I can’t spend all our money on Amazon orders. Because: Pandemic snacks are more important.

So I’ve been re-reading, shopping my own shelves. Actually, pre-COVID-19, I had a plan for My Reading Year (yes, I’m one of those people) that I would do a great deal of re-reading. It all comes from the moving thing: packing up all my books, shedding the ones that are no longer anything more than dead weight (that I didn’t want to move to a new house) and musing over the favorites that I really should re-visit. And this year I wanted to focus on writers I love that write/wrote both fiction and non-fiction.

Madeleine L’Engle falls into that category. Most everyone who recognizes her name would associate it with her Newbery Medal book A Wrinkle in Time – or the recent Oprah Winfrey/Reese Witherspoon/Mindy Kaling movie offering of the same name. A Wrinkle in Time is a seminal book that is often lauded by writers of children’s books. Or sometimes, as in another Newbery Medal book, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, it is the backdrop of another story. (A very good story.)

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties before I even heard of Madeleine L’Engle. (I know, right?) A teacher friend lent A Wrinkle in Time to me, plus all the ensuing Murray family books, aghast that I had never read them. And so a L’Engle groupie I became.

Whatever story L’Engle told, her framework was always a moderately conventional family and I think that was a big part of her appeal. The families were like none I knew – ones that discussed physics and tesseracts while their mother cooked stew for supper over a Bunsen burner in their attached-barn-converted-into-a-laboratory. Or where another mother – an ex-opera singer – played classical music records while she cooked supper. Or where the family sat around and discussed theology with everyone from the 5-year old to Grandfather contributing to the conversation. Really, Madeleine?

I haven’t got to a lot of her published journals or non-fiction offerings yet, but any biographical information I’ve read about her suggests that it was exactly the kind of family she was in herself. Minus maybe the space travel and alien abductions. I assume. And Ms. L’Engle always asserted the importance of every person in her fictional families, no matter what their age or how much they misbehaved.

Grandfather, is in fact, one of my favorite characters in Meet the Austins. A retired minister who exudes wisdom, he lives by the ocean in a converted horse stable: the individual stalls are especially conducive to bookshelves that hold Grandfather’s copious book collection. His granddaughter Vicky describes him as a bibliomaniac. (And then parenthetically, tells the reader to ‘Look it up!’ Such cheek!)

Grandfather doesn’t just keep his favorite words in his books or in his head: the most meaningful to him he has transcribed onto the very walls around him. In his bedroom, a quote from Hildevert of Lavardin circa 1125, reads:

“God is over all things, under all things; outside all; within, but not enclosed; without, but not excluded; above, but not raised up; below, but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly without, embracing; wholly within, filling.”

This quote is so obscure that I couldn’t even Google it. But L’Engle brings attention to a medieval mystic’s words as effortlessly as Hermione Granger waves her wand and pronounces ‘Alohomora!’ to a locked door. (Look it up!)

In the loft, where the children sleep, a poem by Thomas Browne is painted:

If thou could’st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, ‘This is not dead’,
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes, He says, ‘This is enow
Unto itself – ’twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.’

Have I – pre-slow-and-crawling-days-of-Pandemic – been too full of ‘shrewd activity’? Or even now, with my books and my phone and my TV am I ‘replete with very thou’?

There’s something about the writing on the walls that strikes me, the constant reminders of things that Grandfather believed and wanted to remember. In the bedroom, where the first quote is, he has no other pictures except the picture window, because no picture could complete with the ocean view. But the simple juxtaposition of words reminded him of Whose view it was and Who made it.

What do I write on my walls? What do I want to be reminded of?

Besides hanging pictures or words on my walls, I have a way of remembering some of the lovely things I find in books: I put them into another book. My siblings can attest to how I used to cut and paste and make scrapbooks when I was young, sometimes much to their chagrin as ‘the making of many books’ consumed me – and all the homemade flour paste that Mom could make.

I still cut and paste and draw:

It helps me to remember the things that are important:

And not to mistake the wonderful things:

Good writing and good writers can teach us so much, remind us of what’s important and show us what is possible before it happens. The wonderful things can’t last forever but we can remember them and look forward to different, wonderful things.

About A Month Later

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It’s been officially a month since we moved into a smaller home and I have to say: it’s been a busy one. Here’s my one-month recap in no particular order…

  1. Packing, moving, unpacking and ALL that goes with it really can mess with a person’s good intentions. Hence no blog post AT ALL last week. I told myself that I was taking spring break, maybe because the weather was so nice? But then, right smack dab in the middle of the week and despite the near-zero temperatures on either side of Wednesday, we got a blast of minus 30. It was just one day but I got to wondering – was that my fault? Did my smugness about the weather produce a smackdown? Oops. For insurance purposes, I have decided to get back to my two-blog posts a week. If March comes in like a lamb, you have me to thank. You’re welcome.
  2. My bookshelves are still in flux. (See above.) Because, reading emergencies besides, organizing my books is just not as important as work and sleep and feeding ourselves. (Oh, and Amazon Prime as we take our near-daily dose of re-watching The Mentalist from the beginning.) But also, I am trying a new thing with my books – shelving them by color. I’ve always filed my books in a particular order that allowed me to easily track them but author/podcaster Anne Bogel of What Should I Read Next? inspired me to go this crazy route. Crazy also because I’ve always been someone who kept the jackets on the books and now that I’ve removed them all, I don’t recognize any of my books anymore. It’s like going to a family reunion with amnesia.
  3. Remember how we cancelled Christmas? And New Year’s? And basically the first couple weeks of January because everyone around us (but not their dog) got sick? Well, Family Day weekend we had a do-over at my sister-in-law’s with turkey and taters and games and some general holiday hanging out followed by turkey sandwiches and two Oiler wins to boot. A very merry February Christmas indeed.
  4. My article Mom in the Driver’s Seat came out in the February/March 2020 issue of Our Canada magazine. It feels good to get some publishing traction again. But it also was good to remember the story of my mom finally getting her driver’s license when she was well into her fifties! I knew the story, but her grandchildren didn’t. (This is why we need to tell stories.) What a testimony to keep doing hard things even as we get older and “the things” get harder.
  5. I finally got to see the new Little Women movie with my dear friend Rhonda in a quaint little original theatre in Vegreville. Living 40 miles apart, we have no qualms about meeting anywhere within a hundred-mile radius for some good story telling like that, especially if Meryl is in the lineup – and she is the best Aunt March ever. And bonus: Rhonda introduced me to a gem of a restaurant in Veg: Loco Burro Fresh Mexican Grill. Yum. Go eat there now.
  6. And speaking of YUM – we used a gift certificate last weekend with two of our boys for a restaurant whose very name made them happy: MEAT. It was a seriously fun eating experience (not to mention the food was DELICIOUS) and our server Andrew6167 made it even better. (Thanks for the MEAT, Sydney! You always know the best places to eat!)
  7. Strathcona is such a fun place on a Saturday night and after our MEAT, we walked down the back alley and then piled in with all the other late night fans for some Made By Marcus ice cream. The. Best. Ever. Ice. Cream. Ever. Period.
  8. We went to Vegas in Vermilion with our good friends Cliff and Caroline (THE MAYOR) McAuley which was hosted by the Good Life Institute. A fancy meal followed by some fake-money gambling – but the chips made it look like the real thing. The highlight of the evening for me was hanging out with the group of senior ladies that hired Len’s Party Bus to ferry them to and from the event! What a fun bunch!
  9. I went to the Inspiring Women Conference in Lloydminster and was…well, inspired. My favorite: the panel session with Canada’s first female professional chuckwagon racer Amber L’Heureux, silk artist Bonny MacNab and the first female CEO of Lloydminster & District Co-op Leanne Hawes. Not to mention the keynote with Carrie Doll, brilliantly timed just when the afternoon sleepies want to hit – but Doll kept me very entertained and interested. She has a great story and a great podcast, The Inner Circle, where she gets many other Edmonton locals to tell their stories.
  10. My husband and I are enjoying a blast from the past as I am re-reading the Harry Potter books out loud to him every night. We started reading them aloud as a family in 2003 so a revisit is long overdue. We’re just getting into The Prisoner of Azkaban – Large Marge has been deflated and Harry has escaped the Dursleys for another year. Yay Hogwarts!

Okay, I didn’t know I did that much stuff. What a fun re-cap! See you Thursday!

About Two Christmas Stories: Part Two

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Mr. Edwards meets Cowboy Santa. (illustration by David Lockhart)

There is something about finding a familiar story in an anthology that makes me happy. Kinda like, I knew this was good! The second story that I loved from Treasure of Christmas Stories was one called Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus, excerpted, of course, from The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Prairie is actually the second of several books that Wilder wrote about her family experience that bounced between homesteading and moving on in the late 1800s of the American frontier. I loved those earliest books best that showcased littlest Laura with her affinity to her Pa and to always striving for, but never quite matching, perfect older sister Mary’s attitude and behavior. (I won’t touch the un-PC-ness of Wilder’s books as they read in this day and age. For now.)

Ahem. Back to Christmas.

Before Disney Plus and YouTube, before smartphones and separate rooms for every activity, the winter months on the prairie allowed for huge swathes of time for the Ingalls family to sit before a roaring fire in their open-concept home and. . . sew. Or make bullets. Or listen to Pa play the fiddle or read the Bible (on Sundays) and then go to bed.

And so, we find Laura and Mary in the days before Christmas staring out the window at the rain wondering if Christmas will come that year. Because Santa is the one that brings Christmas and snow brings Santa’s reindeer and Santa’s reindeer bring the jolly old elf. And for some reason (probably because of some well-intentioned Ma-and-Pa propaganda) Santa’s reindeer could not come across the roaring creek that was being fed by the constant rain. Like some magical Texas gate.

This is confirmed by Pa when he comes in with a wild turkey for Christmas dinner. The creek is not abating. And here we find out how the propaganda found its footing: Ma and Pa agree that their friend Mr. Edwards, a fellow homesteader who had been invited to Christmas dinner, would not be foolish enough to risk crossing the wild creek for a wild turkey drumstick.

“Of course, that meant that Santa Claus could not come, either.”

And so for a whole page we have to endure the girls going to bed unhappy and Pa so disheartened that he can’t even play the fiddle and Ma suddenly, in spite of all reason, hanging up the girl’s stockings and whispering to a protesting Pa that she could give the girls the last of the white sugar. I repeat: MA HUNG UP ACTUAL SOCKS THAT ACTUAL FEET WENT INTO, PLANNING TO FILL THEM WITH A BAKING STAPLE.

We are so freakin’ spoiled these days.

All that foreshadowing had to lead somewhere and, you guessed it, a cold and wet Mr. Edwards suddenly shows up on their doorstep. When he confesses to Ma and Pa that it wasn’t Christmas dinner that compelled him, but the thought that the little girls would have no gifts on Christmas Day, an eavesdropping-and-supposed-to-be-sleeping Laura sits bolt upright in bed and demands to know if he saw Santa Claus.

While Ma fills the stockings, Mr. Edwards distracts the girls, answering all their questions about him meeting Santa on the streets of Independence, Missouri: how Santa was too old and fat to swim across the river himself, how Santa recognized Edwards from when he was a little boy sleeping in a corn-shuck bed in Tennessee, how Santa led Mr. Edwards over to his pack-mule to retrieve gifts for the girls who lived yonder on the Verdigris River. (Thus solving the snow problem, reasoned Mary.)

Here’s where the real magic happens: as a young girl myself, I would pore over the description of the simple gifts the girls received, as if they were as valuable as those the Magi presented the baby Jesus. A glittering new tin cup. (“Now each had a cup to drink out of.”) A long stick of peppermint candy. (“Sucked…till each stick was sharp-pointed on one end.”) A heart-shaped little cake. (“Made of pure white flour, sweetened with white sugar.”) A shining bright, new penny. (“They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny.”)

And then, the piece de resistance. Mr. Edwards starts pulling sweet potatoes out of his pockets, nine in all. At that point in my life, I had never eaten a sweet potato before (and did not until I learned their magic firsthand at the Christmas table of my husband’s family.) But surely, they must have been better than regular un-sweet potatoes.

The ensuing description of the Christmas meal was not so compelling because I wanted to eat their food. It was because I wanted their delight, their satisfaction, their wonder. And yet it was generated by such simple things like sweet potatoes you can now find in any grocery store and pennies which you could now find discarded on the ground because they aren’t worth anything anymore.

Now I am not particularly fond of camping. Transport me back to Little House on the Prairie and I would probably be more whiny than a rusty door hinge in a haunted house. But I don’t have to go back in time or take a vow of poverty to appreciate the good messages that Laura Ingalls Wilder has sown into her story.

Things are sweeter when they are unexpected and rare.

Holidays are best celebrated with friends and family close.

The simple things really are the best.

I am thankful today for good stories that help me remember this as December rushes onwards to Christmas Day.

About Two Christmas Stories: Part One

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At this time of year when I was a kid, I loved to read a little Scholastic anthology called Treasury of Christmas Stories.

It held all sorts of important Christmas readables: Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Fir Tree (spoiler alert: it ends badly for the title character), the words to carols like Deck the Halls (half of which I already knew for sure – fa la la la la, la la la la) and Clement C. Moore’s precedent-setting poem that taught everyone what Santa really looked like (‘chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf’).

Two stories were my favorites.

The first one was called Christmas Every Day written by W. D. Howells. It’s a story within a story – an impudent little girl asks her father to tell her a Christmas story and, perhaps sensing a learning moment, he relates to her a cautionary tale of sorts. The little girl in the story petitions the Christmas Fairy, begging her to have Christmas every day. (Fairies have always been powerful females.) After many, many pestering letters, the Fairy acquiesces, with the caveat that “she might have it Christmas every day for a year, and then they would see about having it longer”.

You can imagine how it played out. Regular Christmas came: full stockings followed by presents followed by too much candy followed by a full turkey dinner extravaganza followed by sledding until the little girl came in with a stomach-ache and then everyone in the family went to bed early, cross.

But then the next day, it happened again. And the next day after that, and so on and so on, for the entire year.

Turkeys went up astronomically in price, then became scarce. Cranberries cost a diamond apiece. The woods became stubble fields, all the trees cut down to be decorated indoors. And people became poorer and poorer, buying presents and serving up Christmas the way Christmas was supposed to be done, day after day after day, ad nauseum. Well, except for the storekeepers and delivery persons – they were making a killing.

It was intolerable, but unstoppable. All the other holidays were obliterated, except April Fools’ Day, when everything was fake, which actually provided some comic relief.

It’s not that far off from where we are now, with Christmas creeping into the stores sooner and sooner. It used to be that Christmas displays went up sometime after Remembrance Day and it was exciting to see. Then we started to get confused in October when the Halloween treats were juxtaposed with candy canes and chocolate Santas. Now people are tripping over each other trying to snap up Costco’s newest Christmas offerings – in July – because once they’re gone from Costco, they’re gone.

I don’t like the stores messing with my calendar in this way. And I don’t like them telling me how Christmas is supposed to be done. I will never understand who shops in those “Christmas All Year” stores, much less what ______________ individual owns them. (You can insert your own adjective – I didn’t want to be too disparaging.) I like Christmas music to stay in December and even for snow to stay the heck away until then, too. (But that might be asking too much of the Christmas fairy. Because: Alberta.)

A very telling part of the Christmas Every Day story is when people get so tired of giving each other presents that they aren’t even nice about it anymore – they just fling them over fences and into windows saying, ‘Take it, you horrid old thing!’

The impudent little girl gets what she wants. (illustration by David Lockhart)

Ouch. Getting a present “thrown” at you can hurt. But it’s a lot like getting a gift that was shopped for under duress, given because they “had to” and, to add insult to such injury, was paid for with a 22% interest-bearing credit card. Someone I follow on Instagram, a well-known, not un-rich person, was recently advocating a gift-free Christmas, as she has done for the last thirteen. But not just gift-free: debt-free and guilt-free, to boot.

I have to admit, though I am averse to the commercial Christmas that is peddled these days, I still like giving gifts to people I love and appreciate. I like receiving them, too, if the same sentiment comes with them. I like to buy or get a new Christmas decoration (or two) each year. And I embrace the Christmas transformation that happens in my house, in town, on television, on the P.A. system in stores – in December. Just the opposite of it being the same thing every day, it’s nice to embrace the different-ness of Christmas. A weary world rejoices.

Ironically, in the story, the Christmases stop on Christmas Day the following year. People are relieved, then ecstatic. They throw out the candy and burn all the presents. The different-ness that has come is celebrated.

The little girl pays a visit to the Christmas fairy to thank her and this time to make sure that Christmas will NEVER, EVER come again. To which the Christmas fairy very wisely says that “now she was behaving just as greedily as ever, and she’d better look out.” They finally agree to go back to good-ole-once-a-year Christmas in the end.

There’s a lot to be said for the special-ness of things that come once a year, the excitement of revealing things that have been hidden for a long time, that you almost forgot. My little story book is fun to revisit when it comes out of its Christmas box where it lives for the other eleven months. It can even be surprising like a visit from Santa in a little house on the prairie when you didn’t think he’d make it.

But that’s another story.

About Reading and Smart-ness

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A hallmark of the home that I grew up in was the Edmonton Journal. And to me the best part of the Edmonton Journal was the Sunday color comic pages.

The only “stories” I can recollect my mother reading aloud to me were those short vignettes in the funny papers. Every Sunday, it was our ritual: mom and I would lie side by side on her bed and she would read the comics to me. Even when I learned how to read for myself, I insisted that she keep doing this except then we would take turns voicing the different characters. Like a backwards bedtime story, when she was done, Mom went to sleep. It was the only nap that she let herself take all week.

And so, my reading career began with the comics. Short, sweet (well, not always), clever, enigmatic – and with pictures! – the Sunday comics were my high literature at the time. They paved the way for a love of comics that remains true, even though I don’t read many now. Peanuts, Hi & Lois, Blondie, B. C., The Wizard of Id, Tumbleweeds, Beetle Bailey, Funky Winkerbean and Hager the Horrible were the friends that populated my early years, along with Cookie Monster, Mr. Dressup and the Friendly Giant.

Perhaps comics just fit my style, my reading style. I like finishing things: the last cracker in the box, the last of the shampoo in the bottle, the end of a pot of coffee. Finishing things clears room for what’s new. Which is another thing I like. Starting things. Comics are short, started and finished in one sitting.

Much of my reading is like that. Not that I have to finish a book in one sitting, but I like to clearly see the gratification of the end. But because I think it’s healthy to challenge my own preferred parameters, I recently slogged my way through Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, basically skim-reading the last 300 pages. At 950-pages plus, it is a Moby Dick of a book. And all I can think is that I could have read three normal-sized books instead. “Finished three” is better in my economy than “finished one”, even if by page count it’s the same thing. Three stories will always trump one. Ask any self-respecting toddler who begs for “just one more story” to put off the dreaded task of going to sleep.

I worry, sometimes, that this is a failure of mine, that I lack intellectual fortitude. I don’t like tackling the long and hard books. Most Pulitzer or Booker prize winners either baffle me or bore me to tears. I prefer Newbery winners, books written for middle-grade kids and “YA” – young adults, and even Caldecott winners, the best and the brightest of the picture books.

But make no mistake: just because these books are written “for children” doesn’t make their creators any less talented or intelligent than those “other” book winners. Hanging out in the children’s book world on the interweb has confirmed that the authors and illustrators of children’s books are masters in distillation of words and expression of images, and every bit as prolific.

Is it about “smart-ness” – that I don’t like much literary fiction or books written in an Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close manner? It hurts my head just to try and figure out some of those books. Yes, it’s art, and yes, there’s room for All The Art. But there’s also room for All The Readers.

I don’t think that my early love affair with comics set me up for this. Rather, I think I was lucky to be introduced at a young age into the genres of literature that I love. Comics, picture books, kids lit: there’s just as many of those on my Read and To-Be-Read lists as good adult books I have loved.

Well, maybe a little more. Maybe I’m just not that “smart”. Or maybe I’m just not that “old”.