Christmas Books I Love

Books, and literacy, have been a core theme of my life. I was eleven when I was finally able to read unassisted. I am painfully dyslexic, which is evident all over this blog, I’m sure. My grammar can be dicey as can my spelling. If you ever have trouble with my spelling sound it out phonetically. That is what I do with every word I type and read. I am the product of The Orton Gillingham Method. Without it, I would still be illiterate today. The greatest gift I was ever given was in room 303 at the Maynard School in Cambridge MA. Where a teacher and assistant teacher gave me some semblance of literacy. Once I could read I never stopped. The process of learning was absolute abject torture, and should be forbidden under the Geneva Convention. Sadly it remains common even today to torture children to get them to read. What makes the torture so potent is that until you can read, you can’t understand the value of literacy. You have no concept for what literacy offers. You do this absolute torture day after day often for years, for other people who do nothing but express frustration at you for not being normal. You feel like you are a throw away person. I am a 44 year old woman, and all these years later I still hate sleeping. I have so many nightmares, even today. Some of them about car accidents, some of them about being locked in the basement drawing figure 8s with a rectangular crayon to “cure” my dyslexia, in the background I hear a repetition of some woman teaching some madness called eurythmy chanting “lift, carry, place.” I have nightmares about forgetting how to read and having to start all over with the torture that goes far beyond figure 8s, and includes an endless repetition of flash cards with letters, and sometimes those letters can morph into other terrifying images…

I manage a book club today in part to prevent my nightmares from coming true. My logic is, if I never stop reading and writing I can’t forget how because I am constantly in the act. This helps me sleep at night. Because I am constantly reading, books have become a part of everything I do. Seriously. You should see my homestead library, ummm yikes! It is extensive and vast. There is little I do without first crawling into several books about it. A great example of this was when I got a dog and wanted to get one that would work well for me. I spent months in a book studying dogs. Years later again seeking a dog I would once again crawl into books to study dogs first. The result is, I now know quite a lot about dogs and the breeds. For cooking too, I first tend to crawl into books. Every homestead project I have ever done, there are books i explored first. In addition to my herbalism studies through Cornell, I also have bookshelves full of books on herbs. So it should come as no shock….

When it comes to Christmas, and creating a tradition for my husband and homestead… I keep a plethora of books on that too. Books I consult every year and use as inspiration and for information. None of these tomes of brilliance are religious in nature. Christmas for a Buddhist hippy commune brat, isn’t centered on the birth of Jesus. It is centered on Santa Claus, who my mother worked so hard to bring to life for me when I was a child. My dad always put more effort into embodying Scrooge, prior to falling for Tiny Tim. When I got much older sometimes I would help wrap presents for my kid sister with my mom, and a new entity was birthed. Mum was Mrs. Claus, pretending Santa Claus was my dad, secretly she embodied both of the Clauses. So I became, The Solstice Fairy a beautiful, graceful, tiny, white haired being that flew and danced with the snow flakes and wore them as attire. when I helped wrap presents late into the night, that is who I embodied. A fictional character birthed from my pen signing the card, The Solstice Fairy.

The Solstice Fairy retired in Mexico to live by the beach a long time ago now. My kid sister has long been an adult. It might be my greatest sadness as a wife and as a woman…. I have no children of my own to create a magical holiday for. Just my spouse, the homestead, and Pikku the dog. There is no need for The Solstice Fairy or the Clauses anymore given the emptiness space where a child should be.There is a need and will always be a need for light and brightness at the darkest point of the year.

Every holiday tradition, seems to be aimed at creating brightness and light through various traditions, and activities. My personal tradition involves family, self made gifts, lights, and Christmas Ambiance. I work hard to create the ambiance. It comes from decorating by bringing outside in. Music, a beautiful fragrance on the wood stove that smells of fir trees, sweet oranges, and warm spices, are also features of the Christmas ambiance I create here at Wildflower. We do many Christmas related activities within the month of December. They include lots of cookie baking and candy making. Lots of time by the fire, some quiet calm to enjoy good books, a different Christmas movie every night, some years we tie hand written wishes to a log that we throw into the wood stove. Other years we engage in the old Polish tradition of going out Christmas Eve night to watch for the first star. We drink Christmas Gloggi while we watch Finland, declare the Christmas Peace. We read books on Christmas. Some of which help me create the ambiance, food, or some other aspect of the holiday.

It is important to understand, I don’t get paid for anything I discuss here. So if I mention or discuss something I like, it is because I do in fact genuinely like it. I don’t have any publishers or anyone else that pays me to tell you how great the stuff they produce is. No sponsors. This blog is independant like Wildflower Farm homestead. It is just me and it is a labor of love. One part diary, one part homestead journal, one part recipe book, one part homestead wisdom and experience chronicle, it is the story of life here at Wildflower as lived by me.

The books I talk about here, truly have proven highly useful and meaningful for me. I can’t promise it will offer you what it has given me. We are all individuals. But I can tell you how much I enjoyed these books on Christmas and got something out of them and how I think others might also. These are some of the Christmas books, that mean the most to me. This list is incomplete but this is a good place to start. My collection is after all rather extensive. Seriously if I had to choose between buying a book or a new lung I would probably pick the book, and it would be titled Making A New Lung With Origami, or something else of a similar nature. That is just a tragic piece of who I am. Once I could read, once I understood the value of the written word, it became all important to me to gather as many books as I could as often as I could on any and all subjects of interest.

Christmas Baking by Joyce & Laura Klynstra- This book is great for snacks, cookies, cakes, and candies. I find some recipes can be a little advanced and can have ingredients that might be more geared towards a British market and harder to get here in the US? Or at least that is how I interpret some ingredients. But I could be wrong. It is just my experience around where I am some ingredients have been hard to find. But that is the rarity with these recipes not the standard.

Christmas At Highclere by The Countess of Carnarvon- This book is from the real Downton Abbey, a favorite show of mine. It is full of absolutely stunning decor, breath taking photos, recipes, and some fabulous traditions related to Christmas. Some may view this book as perhaps a little snooty. I however absolutely love it. I have found it so educational and so valuable and useful in helping me choose and establish my decor style here at Wildflower. In that…. Different spaces are best served by decorations that bring out the character of the space and enhance it, making it beautiful. They do an amazing job of that at Highclere. It is a master class in Christmas ambiance. Every year I try to find some small way to give a nod to Highclere with my own decor or cooking projects. I never want to try to actually decorate this place quite like Highclere because it would look ridiculous in my tiny homestead. The decor should fit the character of the place. This book is the book that taught me that lesson. The recipes are fabulous….. And I can’t love this book enough.

A Literary Holiday Cookbook by Alison Walsh- Literature and holidays meet and tango. Of course I, of all people absolutely adore this book. This is a lot of fun and spans the holidays well beyond Christmas. Any literature lover will enjoy it.

Christmas On The Farm Edited by Lela Nargi- Between 1893 and 1939, a magazine called The Farmer’s Wife, was an active publication in Minnesota. This book gathers the contents of this old magazine publication into a book. This book is full of old timey recipes. Some of the ingredients can shock. Some people may even wonder what some of the ingredients are. It is full of advice for farm wives surviving the turn of the century. What dinner foods go with what, how to make old fashioned handmade presents, all kinds of great old Christmas paraphernalia. I use this book often for so much. I love an older way of living. I love bringing history into my holiday.

Christmas Traditions In Boston  by Anthony M Sammarco- Locality can be everything when celebrating the holidays. It colors so much. From the weather to the climate you are celebrating in. Localities also offer a history you can find ways to incorporate into your holiday. They can also offer local traditions, and provide the story of the holiday where you are through time. in 1659 Christmas was actually banned by law in my state! The law was over turned in 1681. It wasn’t until 1856 that Christmas was made a state holiday. This book discusses the first 200 years of Christmas in Massachusetts. How The Christmas Tree was introduced to the city of Boston, and so much more. Traditions and knowing where things come from andhow they came to be, are huge factors in the meaning they hold for us. This book brings together the Christmas traditions of Boston.

The Valancourt Book Of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories Edited by Tara Moore- I have long wanted to bring the tradition of ghost stories by the fire on Christmas Eve night to Wildflower. This would be a Victorian tradition that gave us stories such as The Turning Of The Screw, A Christmas Carol, and even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. These stories were not just told by literary geniuses. They were published in newspapers and other publications for reading fun over the holidays. Often read aloud in homes across England on the cold nights surrounding the Christmas holiday. This is a tradition I desperately want to see resurrected cuz who doesn’t love a good ghost story? This book contains 13 terrifying tales all of them pulled from 19th century periodicals. Some authors of these collected stories are forgotten or lesser known some are well known creating a diverse and fun collection. I read these tales every few years usually alone wishing I had others to engage in this old tradition with. This is perhaps the tradition I most desperately want to bring back and bring to Wildflower on a regular basis at Christmas time.

Old Christmas by Washington Irving-  is a collection of short stories, and contains 5 tales. First published in 1819-1820. Irving, writes about English Christmas. He writes of it with warmth and gives it a romance and charm that makes his work highly influential to the Christmases we celebrate today in the USA. This is a new book for me. I look forward to reading it because it is historic, and treats Christmas warmly and romantically. It is always so interesting to understand your influences. I am super looking forward to reading this.

A Country House Christmas by Phyllis Elinor Sandeman- I do believe this book may have originally been titled, Treasure On Earth. It is an account of Christmas in an Edwardian country house. Sandeman, recalls Christmases at Lyme in Cheshire. She recalls the celebrations and theatricals, and the relationship of family and the servants through the holiday. Lyme is now in the care of the National Trust. This book is the dream of childhood holidays past and of a time that will never be experienced again. I am a firm believer that while the past can offer us some of the most ugly ignorance it can also offer us some of the brightest and most beautiful moments. The trick has always been to grab onto the beautiful moments and to try to bring them back while leaving old ignorance behind in the past to be forgotten. What I love about this book, is it brings to life a bright shiny moment in time.

The Dolls Christmas By Tasha Tudor- First off, I could write books about my adoration of Tasha Tudor. I have always loved her, since I was a little girl. This book, is where that love was born long before I could read independently on my own. My copy is old and kind of battered. I do believe it belonged to my mother when she was young. Yep. The copyright is 1950. This is my mother’s book. She gave it to me though many years ago when I moved here to Wildflower. Because Christmas just isn’t Christmas without reading this childhood story of dolls and a dollhouse and the way these dolls celebrate the holiday. Before I could read my mum used to read this one to me out loud. No other story gives quite the same feeling, that all is at peace. This is a great one to read to children. Or to read yourself in search of your child heart, which can be so useful in celebrating holidays.

The Christmas Cat by Efner Tudor Holmes Illustrated by Tasha Tudor- This is another I loved as a small child. It is a great book for children. The art is in the Tasha Tudor style I love so much that speaks to the old fashioned and of comfort, and cozy. A kitten abandoned to the freezing cold of the winter woods is found and brought to the warm home of a pair of young boys who accept the kitten as a Christmas miracle. In the book the boys make Christmas cookies, at the end is the recipe they used. I can’t tell you how many times I made these cookies. Tasha Tudor, was an intrinsic part of my childhood holidays.

The White Christmas Inn by Colleen Wright- was a book club pick for my club. None of us found it to be the greatest thing we ever read, but it was decent. It read a bit like a Hallmark movie. But isn’t that what a modern adult Christmas book is supposed to be? It was perfectly what it was intended to be. The story was loads and buckets of fun. About a small failing New England inn not sure if it could survive into the future a wedding that falls through, and a blizzard that brings together all kinds of interesting unexpected guests… It is about how the inn keepers over come the obstacles to create a magical holiday for their guests and the Christmas miracle that saves their dream of inn keeping.

For many years we opened Wildflower as a small B&B. So for me this book was deeply meaningful. It was and still is what I aspire to be for our guests. Covid, caused us to shut down fairly indefinitely in this capacity at least for now. Maybe one day we will open back up…. But at this point, it would take a Christmas miracle. I found so much fulfillment reading The White Christmas Inn.

Some books not in the stack that deserve mention:

Forever Christmas by Tasha Tudor
Take Peace: A Corgi Cottage Christmas by Tasha Tudor
(yes it is true, I can’t get enough of Tasha Tudor. She is for me, an apotheosis.)
A Christmas Carol by Dickens
The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore
Tomten Tales by Astrid Lindgren
Letters From Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien

As we live through this difficult time, when the bottom of the world  feels as if it will fall out… It is such a gift to be on a homestead. Here, I decide and choose my level of engagement and I get to select what I invest my time and energy into. Here, I can tune out the world, and create a world of my own. Holidays, and holiday magic. Disengagement can be so restful. It is not wrong to take the time to enjoy the holiday magic you need, in order to continue the push for a course correction that will create a better world.

Magic is only possible if you study how to create it and you find it inside yourself. The only hint I can give you, is that I think it lives in your child heart. The one we silence nearly all the time and have almost as adults, lost all connection with.
We all have a duty to be wizards, Clauses, or Solstice Fairies, for all those we love and care about through the festivals of lights that happen in December across traditions and the world.
I hope you enjoy some of the books that have helped to teach me the Christmas wizardry that I pull out every Christmas to create a time and place outside of time and space that can be magical for those who find their way to Wildflower. I truly believe the ones who need this place are the ones who find it… Even with all that is going on right now, it is such a gift to make my home here.
Thank you so much for reading
Happy Holidays
Amanda Of Wildflower Farm