Laze out in the afternoon sun in December, during Christmas or the New Year with a Christmas story book at your disposal.
It could even be your ideal companion at bedtime with mommy dearest reading them out to her sleepy kid. Christmas Carnivals offers online information on Christmas Story Books.
The Angel Doll: A Christmas Story by Jerry Bledsoe is proof that a Christmas book need not drip with mawkish sentimentality. This affecting novella though published as fiction, has the ring of truth, plus the asset of lean prose and carefully nuanced delivery. The tale is set in the early 1950s in a small North Carolina town, where the 10-year-old narrator shares a newspaper route with a friend, Whitey Black. Whitey's father is dead, and his younger sister, Sandy, has survived polio with a wasted leg and precarious health. The work is inspired by the classic The Littlest Angel.
Sandy hopes for an angel doll for Christmas. How Whitey manages to find the doll, and the tragic event that ensues, is the substance of the story. Because Bledsoe doesn't display the emotions, the poignant ending is neither manipulative nor preachy, but authentically moving. One wishes, however, that the illustrations by Tim Rickard were better.
Estelle Bryer is a Waldorf early childhood educator, eurythmist, author, and well-known South African puppeteer. Her stories range from Advent through Christmas ending with the Holy Family's flight into Egypt, in fact, tales for the whole year. These stories include The Nativity and Three Kings Plays with instructions for staging, stories, songs, making a Crib Scene and an Advent Calendar that soon become family favorites, with their imaginative yet down to earth language and lively illustrations. Other stories about Christ, his birth, his life and times at Nazareth and Bethlehem abound in the canon of Christmas tales.
Find out all about them at
Christmas CarnivalsChristmas Story Books.
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