It’s the shortest day of the year today and, looking out of the window while drinking my tea, I can’t but think it’s just as well. Rain and wind and murk is all we’ve had all day, no sign of the sun. However, it’s quite cosy in my cupboard-like study and fairy lights sparkle all the brighter in the gloom. And of course, the dust isn’t quite so noticeable when it’s dark.
I am feeling quite smug as I drink my tea because I have just delivered my last Christmas card and wrapped my last present. And now I am about to start packing, because we’re spending Christmas with my parents. But this is the best moment of packing: considering which books to take.
For my daughter I’m packing One Christmas Wish by Katherine Rundell (illustrated by Emily Sutton), The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden (illustrated by Adrienne Adams), The Little Lamb of Bethlehem by Margaret Tempest and The Night Before Christmas by Clement Moore (illustrated by Angela Barrett) because we like rereading them at Christmas. She’s packing a few other books but I do not yet know what they will be.
I like to reread ‘Babette’s Feast’ (Isak Dinesen) at Christmas but I think I shall read that this evening instead of further weighing down my suitcase. I don’t want to cripple myself, and I happen to know that Father Christmas will be giving me a couple of hefty tomes to bring back (Melmoth by Sarah Perry and The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition by Ursula Le Guin and illustrated by Charles Vess). I know this because I helped Father Christmas out and bought them for myself heh heh heh.
But now I must decide on one – or at most two – books to take with me, for the journey and until Christmas Day. (Although in an emergency I can help myself to my parents’ books, they are kind like that.) What should they be? I have started rereading Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love but I am afraid I’ll finish it before we leave. I was saving The Way Past Winter for the holidays but I had to read that last week to keep myself cheerful during a cat crisis. I want something immersive, perhaps nineteenth-century, not too heavy (literally and figuratively), something of a page-turner. When I have finished my tea, I’ll start looking through the shelves.
Do you have any favourite Christmas books? And what will you be reading over the holidays?
And now this seems as good a time as any to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year, and to hope that 2019 is good to all of you. Thank you for reading my blog, and thank you for all your lovely comments.
(Angela Barrett, ‘A right jolly old elf’, from The Night Before Christmas, Orchard Books, 2012; found here; I don’t know if you can see how luminous the colours are, especially the blues, quite amazing)