DAY 9 – ADVENT 2023

 HOLIDAY LITERATURE

We do enjoy our evening’s reading. We have a lot of Geographics to read – also Collier’s, the Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, three Copper monthlies, Pathfinder, Daily Chronicle, Clearwater Tribune, and M.W.A. monthly. Also Christian Herald. – Ina Dobson, 1935

I can just see my grandparents, Jack and Ina, reading in the evening. Perhaps they sat at the dining room table under the Aladdin lamp.

I collect books about the festive Christmas celebrations of yore – or the lack thereof. Time passes, and eventually the collective memory of people and the way they lived fades. The world forgets so much, and the facts of the past become history trivia.

I listen to a seasonal podcast, “Christmas Past,” by Brian Earl (Facebook page here). A few weeks ago, Brian interviewed Thomas Ruys Smith, who recently published a book titled The Last Gift: The Christmas Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Smith gathered these stories from magazines and newspapers dating from the late 19^th century until 1923 or so. He begins the introduction with the statement: “In her own lifetime, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was internationally renowned as one of the most important and beloved American writers of the late nineteenth century.” I had never heard of Mrs. Freeman, and I was intrigued. These are just the kind of stories Grandma Ina would have read. I bought the book and try to read from it daily.

Here are some other compilations of old-time Christmas stories in my collection:

·      Journey into Christmas, by Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1928

·      Christmas Stories Rediscovered (short stories from The Century Magazine, 1891-1905), edited by Barbara Quarton, 2008

·      Fifty Years of Christmas Stories (an anthology of stories, poems, and short pieces from “The Christian Herald”), edited by Ruth M. Elmquist, 1951

·      The Fireside Book of Christmas Stories, edited by Edward Wagenknecht, 1945 (This is a thick book that I found at a rummage sale.)

·      Vintage Christmas (holiday stories from Rural PEI), Marlene Campbell, 2016

Reading holiday literature with my mother was an important part of Christmas when I was a child, and I continue to enjoy it. I don’t need to find Ina’s Christmas in literature because she has described it well in her letters, but I like to read the old-time stories that she might have read. KW