Once in the Year by Elizabeth Yates is such a pretty Christmas book!
The dust jacket on my 1947 book is a little tattered but the book itself is still lovely.
I always use it as part of my Christmas decor.
The author lived in Peterborough, New Hampshire as did her illustrator Nora Unwin after moving to the U.S. from London. The book is about a young boy named Peter living on a New England farm with his parents, and takes place on Christmas Eve.
Martha was making Christmas cookies and Peter sat on the stool in the kitchen watching her. The dough that had been chilled was rolled out very thin and then the deft hands cut it into shapes.
After the cookies are done and the kitchen cleaned, Peter and his mother go into the living room where his mother takes her Bible and reads to him the Christmas story from the second chapter of Luke.
Afterwards he notices a flower pressed into the pages of the Bible and his mother tells him about a Christmas Eve when she was younger than him and a forest came alive with blooms when she walked outside alone on a snowy Christmas Eve. She picked a sprig of heartsease and kept it always. When her five brothers teased her about her story of the forest blooming in midwinter, her mother told her something that she now wants Peter to know:
When something wonderful happens to people on Christmas Eve, it is to be cherished in the heart and in the mind. We must not be afraid of the wonderful things, nor must we let others laugh them away from us. Only thus do we learn to hold our dreams.
Later that evening when his parents have gone to church, an old farmhand who lives with them tells Peter a legend about animals in the barn talking to each other at midnight on Christmas Eve.
That night after his parents are asleep, Peter slips away quietly to the barn.
At midnight, Peter hears the animals in the barn talking to each other telling the story of the birth of the Babe and their part in it.
For those of you who traditionally read the Christmas story from the Bible on Christmas Eve, this book might be another way of presenting it.
However, copies of it here in the U.S. are rarer than hen's teeth. I found one here, without a dust jacket.
I thought I'd show you a few pictures of the cabinet this book is displayed on in our living room.
This tall cabinet holds things I don't have room for in my kitchen: pie plates, cookie sheets, casserole dishes, turkey roaster, sifters, springform pans, bundt pans, cake plates, etc.
It also displays two photographs in silver frames, one of my parents when I was a baby and we were living in Pennsylvania while my father was in officer training school. I think it's one of the most romantic photographs ever!
And the photograph behind them is pretty darn romantic too, yours truly and RH our senior year of high school in front of his '47 Chevrolet coupe.
Some things constantly change around my house in puttering sessions but those two photographs stay put, and the cup and demitasse spoons that belonged to RH's mother.
I hope you're all finding moments of joy and peace in this special month of December. I know it's not easy. Nerves are stretched thin, everything is topsy turvy. Plans for the holidays may be on hold, subject to change at the last minute, and honestly sometimes I want to pitch a fit and scream for answers.
I try to play this card: Lord, this may be my last Christmas! (Meaning--why can't it be normal?) And then I'm so ashamed because there are so many already who won't be here for this Christmas.
So, like you, I try to remember to be thankful each morning that I am able to get out of bed and go about my day. And I try to remember that each day is an opportunity to follow the Star.
For once, there is time for that, plenty of it.
