It was like ripping off a Band-Aid. After church it had to go—the tree. Tonight I can’t stand to look at that corner of the room, so dark and sad.

Have I betrayed my beloved Christmas? Should I have nursed that dry old fir through Twelfth Night?

No, it was time. I’m the one who feels betrayed—by the calendar.

With every last pine needle vacuumed (ha! I’ll be finding them for weeks), I went straight to my Milk and Cookies cookbook and started frantically pulling out butter and eggs and chocolate. These cookies weren’t for a party or a church function or a gift—they were for me. Oh, and my family.

Two days ago I was singing along to “The Cherry Tree” carol and fixing and making and baking for a tea for my young nieces and nephews. We’d given them teacups, rescued from antique markets, each one with a glittery invitation (made by my twins) tied with red yarn onto the handle.

Drink out of me
At a Christmas Tea… etc. 

One of my favorite Christmas moments was watching two-year-old Kitty tremble with excitement as she unwrapped her big girl cup. She beamed as she held up the Depression glass, struggling to get her tiny hands around it. Her older sister, Evelyn, now five, was much more adept with her treasure. Evie was that toddling age a few minutes ago. Why does time feel like an enemy?

How can all the reveling be over? What’s left are a few vases of holly and a hallway full of boxes waiting to be put in the attic. And a lot of memories, I suppose.

 I can’t think about those today. It still hurts, the Band-Aid ripping.

 I need another cookie, or three.

 “One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bull-dozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.” ~ O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi”

Books, perhaps, run a close second to Christmas music in the way they illuminate the season. And, as with music, (for me) old books make better friends.

It’s funny how fire and words beg more urgently during the busiest season of the year. But a December without a good Temple Bailey tale read while toasting my toes is like a Coke without fizz. I like these sentimental stories probably first published in a ladies journal. Bess Streeter Aldrich’s “Bid the Tapers Twinkle” is a favorite, too.

We’ve read out loud year after year Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” the story of a young boy and his elderly relative against the world. The pair are armed with fruitcakes, a dog named Queenie, and a keen sense of what Christmas and childhood and family are for. Peter Marshall’s sermons, “Let’s Keep Christmas” and “Invitation by Jesus” are wonderful read out-louds as well.

I dare anyone to read aloud A Bird’s Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin. Bringing tears (or ugly sobs) every time, it’s a story of a little girl who shows us all a thing or two about keeping Christmas—even from one’s sickbed. Lloyd C. Douglas’ Home for Christmas is a sweet glimpse of the not-so-distant past. And it wouldn’t be Christmas without Dickens, of course. Far shorter is the “Three Stockings” chapter in Jan Struther’s lovely collection of essays about family life during WWII England, Mrs. Miniver. It’s full of nuggets. Early (too early) Christmas morning, our heroine reflects after being pounced on in bed by children eager to start the festivities,

“There were sounds of movement in the house; they were within measurable distance of the blessed chink of early morning tea. Mrs. Miniver looked towards the window. The dark sky had already paled a little in its frame of cherry-pink chintz. Eternity framed in domesticity. Never mind. One had to frame it in something, to see it at all.”

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There are lovely smells issuing from the kitchen, and our tree is shining in its glory, but we ran out of toilet paper and soap today.

I’m exhausted. Although I’m expecting guests for brunch in the morning, I can’t tie one more ribbon on anything tonight—at least not with the proper attitude. I’ve been tending my inbox and ironing table linens and running kids all over town, and it’s a little discouraging to go to bed thinking about all that didn’t get done today.

So I won’t. I’ll ask for the grace to let it go. (The toilet paper and soap situation has been remedied, so all is right and good with the world.)

Today I bring you a much better treat than any I could offer, a beautifully told (very) short story by masterful writer Walter Wangerin, Jr. Read it and then listen to Jason Gray and Andy Gullahorn’s amazing adaptation of the story into song. (For details about how these guys did it, visit the Rabbit Room.)

I have a Friend who writes, reads incessantly, sings soprano, plays piano and guitar, sews, draws, cooks, dances, gardens, cleans a much-loved but large and dusty old farmhouse and, every morning and night, tends a gaggle of animals.

But now, in her spare time, she has really gone and done it.

She has made a book.

I don’t mean she wrote a novel. That’s almost old hat. She made a book.

No one in the world of printing books for a living would help her, not in the way she envisioned. So she took her dream to her husband, who said, more or less, “I’ll build you a press.” They studied up, and he did it. I’ve seen the benign-looking contraption he engineered sitting in an upstairs room now dedicated to publishing.

So these two, with the help of a few artistic friends, spent billions of hours turning a copyright-expired story by L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, into Low Door Press’ first product. A hundred years after Kilmeny of the Orchard’s first run, husband and wife printed and folded, and Lanier spent a season sewing signatures by hand. Her artist-sister painted the frontispiece, and an artist-friend tried his hand at the art of old-fashioned letterpress.

There was sweat and tears and maybe a little blood. The result: something solid and beautiful to touch and smell and put on a shelf high so tiny hands can’t reach.

It’s not a book to read in the bathtub.

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These are the golden sessions—when our slippers are on, our feet spread out toward the blaze, and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world and something beyond the world opens itself to our minds as we talk… Life (natural life) has no better gift to give than friendship.~ C.S. Lewis

Yesterday I leapt before I looked and shared a little bit more of Helen—and thus my soul—than is my custom. I went against policy, shall we say.

I was suddenly inspired while slipping on my red suede shoes. There I was, getting dolled up for book club on a day when the roads were messy and school was closed. The phone in the kitchen kept ringing, but never did it cross my mind that our little gathering would be cancelled. I knew better—it would take much more than an ice storm to call off our monthly meeting, which has gone on despite kids with the flu, power outages, broken heaters and all kinds of weather extremes. I wasn’t even deviating from vulnerable footwear for the occasion. This reminded me of something in a book, my book.

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A Healthy Diet of Delicious Books

You’d think, or at least I would, that volunteering at a middle school book fair might be a cozy way to spend a stormy Wednesday morning. Rain was pounding on the roof of the library, I mean media center, and thunder rumbled. I was dry and warm and surrounded by books. But the titles staring back at me from the shelves were unsettling. No wonder Helen is struggling out there. I’m surprised she has generated as much interest as she has. I can’t believe I sent her into that cold, hard world.

I offered to help at the fair because I want to be involved at my children’s school, but I also was in research mode. What’s going on with adolescents and fiction, I wondered. I knew things were bleak, but I underestimated how much. A whole table of graphic novels (called comic books back in the day)? Endless edgy fantasy series that seem inspired by video games? Violence and gore galore? And who decided that young adult titles for females all have to include the words “clique” or “gossip”?

I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but when more than a dozen covers in one place are spattered with blood, me thinks I sense a trend or two.

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“Instead of going rigid, I go calm. I center down wherever I am; I find a balance and repose. I retreat—not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone.” ~ Annie Dillard while stalking muskrats at Tinker Creek

There are four small butterflies hovering over the withered, late summer blooms in our little garden in front. At this point in the season, they are the most cheerful things out there.

If I were Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) writer Annie Dillard, I would’ve looked up what type of butterfly they are, and I could tell you their Latin name. (She couldn’t google back then; I could if I had more of that “holy curiosity” Einstein warns us to hold on to.) If I were her, I would have investigated what these particular butterflies eat and what eats them, their mating habits, whether they carry any parasitic insects and where they lay their eggs. I also would’ve won the Pulitzer Prize.

Alas, Annie Dillard I am not.

Since this merry winged quartet is hanging around only fifteen feet or so from my front door, greeting me several times a day as I cut through the garden lugging in groceries or Sadie or both, I have grouped them in a decidedly non-scientific category, a sentimentalized species called All Things House. For the last few weeks I’ve made pets out of them, sort of, deciding their wild frenzy of fluttering is just for me, an extension of the home I love to come back to. I have an affection for the sound of my step on the wooden porch, the very feel of the pretty but cantankerous crystal doorknob, and, now, the butterflies.

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“Here at the magic hour
Time and eternity
Mingle a moment in chorus
Here at the magic hour
Bright is the mystery
Plain is the beauty before us
Could this beauty be for us?”
~ from “The Magic Hour” by Andrew Peterson and Don Chaffer

Dipping her toes into the water, Lanier, wearing huge movie star sunglasses to match her Grace Kelly-style bathing suit, sipped her frozen coffee concoction and wondered out loud if 18^th century Gothic novelist Ann Radcliff had ever been discussed in a poolside setting.

“Maybe not since the 1930s,” said Jenijoy, who had orchestrated the afternoon at a friend’s pool for our little book club.

“I can’t even see Laura and Lanier over there because of Rachel’s hat!” interjected Louise. The hat, a big white floppy affair, made Rachel look like a “moonflower,” Lanier said.

But it wasn’t Rachel’s fault—Jenijoy is the one who supplied the sun hats. And fluffy white beach towels. And 1960s loungey type music and frozen grapefruit aperitifs and a table set with vintage linens and glassware. And no afternoon at the pool is complete without giant pink caladium leaves and ferns floating elegantly in the water.

We are a quirky assemblage of six that sets out to make pimento cheese sandwiches and 95 degree heat somewhat glamorous. We try, anyways.

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“Christ above me, Christ beneath me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.”
~ from St. Patrick’s Breastplate, 5th century

My head is still reeling from this past weekend’s conference hosted by artists who are Christians. I have a notebook full of scribbling and a full heart, too. My cup was running over. In fact, as my dear friend, L., said, it was like “drinking water from a fire hydrant.”

It got me to thinking… too many things to ever hash out here. But there is one theme that has been echoing through my mind for the last year. The beauty of it breaks my heart. And yet it’s so obvious: God is everywhere.

Most of us learned that in Sunday school when we were four, I know. But somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, we forget. We deny. Or we fail to see.

We are not living in a Godless age. There’s no such thing.

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 “The dusky glen laid cool hands on him. He rolled up the hems of his blue denim breeches and stepped with bare dirty feet into the shallow spring. His toes sunk into the sand. It oozed softly between them and over his bony ankles. The water was so cold that for a moment it burned his skin. Then it made a rippling sound, flowing past his pipe-stem legs, and was entirely delicious.”  ~ Jody at the spring in Marjorie Rawlings’ The Yearling

Last night was a victory against my worries over our waning attention spans. I read The Yearling to Emma and Maggie for more than an hour. So engrossed were we that we could’ve kept going, but the spouse came up in his pajamas and announced the beginning of Mad Men on TV. My throat was as dry as toast, and he bribed me with a cup of tea, so I shut the book despite the girls’ groaning.

It’s delicious to be so absorbed in a story. I don’t like what I fear spending time on the computer or playing Wii or even watching the cooking channel might be doing to our brains. The twins know to ask their dad, when possible, to do these things, as I almost always say no. “Go outside!” I bark. But it’s 120 degrees in the shade, so they trudge in after ten minutes and go back to the tower of library books on their bedside table.

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