Christmas readings

Christmas offers a wealth of opportunities for reading aloud.  If you haven't had books read to you since you were a child, you should rediscover it.  It is the last word in cosiness.

Jeff's family reads the "Dulce Domum" chapter from The Wind in the Willows.

In the fore-court, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field-mice stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal. As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, `Now then, one, two, three!' and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.

I'm fond of E. Nesbit's "The Conscience Pudding."

It was sitting in the kitchen, I think, that brought to our minds my father's parting words — about the pudding, I mean. 

 Oswald said, "Father said we couldn't have much of a Christmas for secret reasons, and he said he had told Matilda to make us a plain pudding." 

The plain pudding instantly cast its shadow over the deepening gloom of our young minds. 

"I wonder how plain she'll make it?" Dicky said.

People have strong opinions about O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi."  I used to hate it, but now I appreciate that last paragraph on the worth of generous love.

She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present.  She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result.

"A Child's Christmas in Wales" is just right for reading aloud.

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. 

"A Christmas Carol" is long for reading aloud, but totally worth it.  Break it up over a couple of evenings.

His hands were busy with his garments all this time: turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance. 

"I don't know what to do!'' cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings. ``I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!''

Happy reading.