Children's Books, Everyday Life, Parenting

My One Christmas Decorating Tip

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It’s Christmas night, and I hope you’ve all had a wonderful Christmas this year. Before we wrap this holiday season up, I thought I’d share my one original thought about Christmas decorating. I think it works for everyone. If you’ve read this post, you know decorating is not on the top of the list in our house this Christmas. But one area I never forget to decorate is beneath the Christmas tree.

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Don’t worry, this post is not about how the only present we give our children for Christmas is the gift of reading! For better or worse, we give them gifts of toys and candy and the usual Christmas presents, though we try to keep it small scale. However, I don’t put the wrapped gifts under the tree until the night before Christmas. I’m pretty sure the suspense would kill them, and I wouldn’t be able to leave them alone in the room without fearing I’d come back to find every single gift unwrapped. So I put our Christmas picture books under the tree for the majority of the Christmas season. I think it’s a fun way to decorate with books and encourage the kids to think more about the big picture of Christmas. It’s also nice to avoid the counting how many presents each child has and shaking them, etc. And their faces when they first see presents under the tree on Christmas morning…they are worth waiting for.

So, there’s my one holiday decorating hint: books under the tree. I’m still working on figuring out which Christmas picture books are our favorite, and then it will take me even longer to collect them. I don’t buy many books, but I think meaningful Christmas books are a worthwhile investment.

Do you have favorite holiday picture books? Let me know in the comments!

 

Reviews

Letters from Skye: A Review

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Some you already know that I love an epistolary novel. I talked about my favorites a few months ago in Letters That Make Books. I recently came across Letters from Skye, a novel by Jessica Brockmole, made up of letters from two different couples in two different wars. Here’s the summary from Goodreads.com:

Letters from SkyeA sweeping story told in letters, spanning two continents and two world wars, Jessica Brockmole’s atmospheric debut novel captures the indelible ways that people fall in love, and celebrates the power of the written word to stir the heart.

March 1912: Twenty-four-year-old Elspeth Dunn, a published poet, has never seen the world beyond her home on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye. So she is astonished when her first fan letter arrives, from a college student, David Graham, in far-away America. As the two strike up a correspondence—sharing their favorite books, wildest hopes, and deepest secrets—their exchanges blossom into friendship, and eventually into love. But as World War I engulfs Europe and David volunteers as an ambulance driver on the Western front, Elspeth can only wait for him on Skye, hoping he’ll survive.

June 1940: At the start of World War II, Elspeth’s daughter, Margaret, has fallen for a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Her mother warns her against seeking love in wartime, an admonition Margaret doesn’t understand. Then, after a bomb rocks Elspeth’s house, and letters that were hidden in a wall come raining down, Elspeth disappears. Only a single letter remains as a clue to Elspeth’s whereabouts. As Margaret sets out to discover where her mother has gone, she must also face the truth of what happened to her family long ago.

I typically try to avoid books that are divided between two time periods, but that’s getting harder to do! Uncovering the past is a current obsession in literature. The time period of this book was similar to Kate Morton’s The Secret Keeper, but the plot was not as full and well developed. Over all, Letters from Skye was middling to not all that great. I loved the setting of the Island of Skye, off of the coast of Scotland, but more description would have really enriched the book. The characters didn’t appeal to me much. The main character, Elspeth, is intriguing and likable at first. She has an Emily Bronte vibe to her. Her choices throughout the book baffled me, though. Her daughter Margaret is more of a Nancy Drew. She sometimes made me think “give me a break with the gumption thing, will you?” The male main character, David, is…erm…not my type. If you have read this book already, you know what I mean when I say, “Team Iain!” For the most part, I wished the characters of the first World War would just get out of their own tangled way.

But beyond the characters, the part about this book that brought it down most for me was the theme of adultery. I know, I know, how Puritan is it to throw out the scarlet letter and hate on it. But this book makes an extramarital affair look mostly lovely, which seems convoluted to me. I know life isn’t black and white, I know the human mind can justify all kinds of things, but in the lives of some of my friends currently and since high school, I have only seen the ugly truth that extramarital affairs cause wreckage. Have I seen good come out of these situations? Yes, sometimes, but the good is slow to come and comes with a great deal of pain. Though this book doesn’t completely ignore the heartache of an affair, it does skim over it way more than reality does.

But in all honesty, I don’t think I would have loved this book with or without the adultery theme. There was just something missing in the plot and the characters. Beautiful cover, though. =)

If you enjoy books made up of letters exchanged between characters, I’d recommend The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society or  84, Charing Cross Road over Letters from Skye.

Everyday Life, Reading

A Woman Named Fairlight

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When I first read the book Christy, by Catherine Marshall, I was about twelve. I loved it for the adventure, bravery, and romance. I re-read it after I had been married for a few years, and got something entirely different out of it. This passage is one I think of every day when the sun is shining warm and bright and the dishes are crusty in the sink. It features Christy’s best friend in the mountains, Fairlight Spencer. Her very name is poetry.

“[Fairlight] taught me something important about the use of time and how to enjoy life. With a husband and five children to cook, clean, wash, even make clothes for, and with no modern conveniences at all not even piped-in water, Fairlight might have felt burdened and sorry for herself–but she did not. Often, she found time to pause in her dishwashing to let her eyes and her spirit drink in the beauty of a sunset. She would interrupt her work to call the children and revel with them in the grandeur of thunderheads piling up over the mountain peaks, heat lightning flashing behind the clouds like fireworks. “It lifts the heart,” she would say, and that was explanation enough for any interruption.

There was always time for a story in front of the fire with the children snuggled against her; always leisure for the family to gather on the porch “to sing the moon up.”

Fairlight told me how on the first fine spring day, she considered it only right and proper to drop her housework: “The house, it’s already been a-settin’ here for a hundred years. It’ll be right here tomorrow. It’s today I must be livin'” and make her way to one particular spot she knew. There she would kneel and with her long slender fingers brush aside the dead, sodden leaves and gaze wonderingly on the first blossoms of the trailing arbutus.” (Chapter 17, Christy). 

Trailing Arbutus

Yesterday was a day when I remembered Fairlight and threw the daily routine to the wind. One o’clock is when my two-year-old Isaac is supposed to go down for his afternoon nap. But the sun was warm, the day was bright, and the cold rain that had plagued us for a week-and-a-half was finally gone. We spent an hour outside, pretending to spin the pine straw all over our yard into gold (Ella’s favorite outdoor make believe game). You’ll be relieved to know that we spun enough gold so that the king decided not to throw us into the dungeon. Believe it or not, it was Isaac asking “Can I take a nap now?” that finally sent us inside. Poor kid. I maintain fresh air is just as good as a nap, but maybe not for a two-year-old. Fortunately for him, he got both. Now that the gray day is back, we hold the memory of sun rays on our warm faces until it breaks through the clouds again. And, yes, I did get around to washing those crusty dishes.

What feeds your soul is different than what feeds mine. Bright sunshine may be nice, but what you may really love is baking scrumptious chocolate delicacies, or creating beauty out of nothing but fabric and thread or a few blocks of wood. Maybe getting your car really clean or organizing your kitchen pantry makes your heart sing. Maybe it’s just sitting by the fire with hot coffee and your loved ones. Whatever it is, remember Fairlight and leave the laundry unfolded. Grab a book, grab your family, grab your favorite baking ingredients, grab on to what makes you feel alive, and tell everyone, “it’s today we must be living.” And have a truly amazing weekend.

 

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Children's Books, Reading, Reviews, Top Ten Tuesday, Young Adult

A Book for Your Winter TBR List: The Secret of the Ruby Ring

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The Secret of the Ruby RingHoliday break is soon to begin for kids, and hopefully that means you’re thinking of some great books that will encourage you and your kids to have fun reading while taking a break from the required reading of school and every day life. Today I’m sharing about a book that I absolutely loved as a young girl–I think kids ages 8-92 should put this on their Winter To Be Read list. This book, The Secret of the Ruby Ring, by Yvonne MacGrory,  is one I picked up on a weekly library trip at age ten, when our local library’s children section had a castle dungeon feel and every book I picked up was a treasure. Man, I miss those days. I haven’t thought about the book in ages, though I loved it so much, but a few days ago when my daughter asked for a bed time story, the plot of this book popped into my head and I thought, “Gasp- perfect!” Here’s the summary from Goodreads.com:

Lucy, a rather spoiled almost-eleven-year-old, gets a very special birthday present from her grandmother. This gift, a star ruby ring, has been passed down for generations through Lucy’s family. The evening before her birthday, Lucy accidentally discovers the magical secret of the ring: The secret of this Ruby Ring is that two wishes it can bring.

Twisting the ring and making her first wish, Lucy finds herself transported to a far away time, that of Ireland in 1885, a time of unrest, evictions, and boycotting. At first, Lucy is intrigued by Langley Castle and its inhabitants, but soon she misses her family and friends, his grandmother the only real connection is now living across town with her home care taker from https://www.careshyft.com/san-antonio/. When she decides to use her second wish to go home, Lucy discovers that the ring has disappeared.

Can Lucy convince young Robert that she is from another age? Will he help her to retrieve the ruby ring, or will Lucy be trapped forever in a bygone age?

Now, before you roll your eyes and say, “time travel again, puhlease,” let me tell you that this book had a profound positive effect on me at age ten. I thought the story was magical (I think I read it twice before I returned it to the library), but I also thought the message applied to me: you’re not put on this earth to be a princess and have the world revolve around you. It’s pretty cool when a book delivers a message so clearly, a ten-year-old girl can take it to heart. And that message is one our Disney princess culture girls need to hear, often and over and over again. Actually, it’s one I need to hear pretty often, too, based on my Downton Abbey envy. One of the greatest things about this book  is that when I recently picked it up to read as an adult, I still loved it. The characters were so personable and the plot was perfectly paced between action and insight into Lucy’s character. Though it never hit the best seller list in the U.S., it won Children’s Book of the Year in Ireland in 1994 and really reads like a classic. This would be a great book for young girls all the way to  grown ladies to read over Christmas break. I wish I could read it for the first time with you.

This post is my contribution to the Top Ten Tuesday theme, Winter Reading List, over at the awesome blog, The Broke and the Bookish. Go on over to the B&B blog to see all the other winter reading lists that book lovers are putting together today. And thanks for stopping by Mia The Reader, too! Leave a comment on what your favorite Winter read is. I’m always looking for a great read to add to my TBR list. 

Everyday Life

What Christmas Looks Like Sometimes

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So I have just been dying to show the blog-reading world my decorated mantel for Christmas. Because it is truly inspired. Prepare to ooh and ah.

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Yes, you have my permission to pin that.

Okay, so my mantel looks like that because my kitchen looks like this:

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Last week my husband was off from work and we decided it would be a good time to work on our kitchen cabinets. They were a honey oak finish, solid oak, but the wood was looking a little orangy and the grain was very…grainy. It wasn’t technically terrible, but it irked us. So we had this plan to re-glaze the cabinets. We read all about it on a DIY blog and thought, “yep, we got this.” Famous last thoughts. We started the reglazing with one cabinet door and decided it was absolutely not what we wanted and very expensive. Then, my husband did the entire kitchen cabinet frame (the part featured in the picture above) in a dark shade of Polyshade. Yes, in the picture it’s white. That’s because after about 3 hours of going into the kitchen, shaking our heads and walking back out, and muttering “arson,” we decided we hated the look of the darker cabinets. My husband dubbed the kitchen “The place where light goes to die.” That’s what brings us to this point–after swearing we would never paint kitchen cabinets again, we have applied three coats of primer to our kitchen cabinets in the last 36 hours. We are definitely past the point of no return. And I love it! I love having white cabinets. This is the third set of kitchen cabinets I’ve hand painted white in the last ten years. Hand. Painted. I am a bona fide artiste. And yeah, I really like white cabinets.

However, mixed with my joy at the prospect of my not-so-enjoyable kitchen becoming quite close to the kitchen I’ve wished for, there’s a large amount of guilt. My mantle is dismal. My porch garland is sitting in the box next to the front door. Our tree is up and decorated, but when is the last time I watered it? What about hanging some pretty ornaments with ribbon off of our (empty) curtain rods? What about making my house into a perfect winter wonderland for my tiny elves, ages 2 and 4?

Well…what about it? Why am I feeling this nagging shame at the half-baked state of my December home? The kids are playing with the manger scene. They’re listening to Christmas music. They’re watching Frosty The Snowman and and going to the Nutcracker Ballet and packing Operation Christmas Child shoe boxes. Ella is talking about how it’s Christmas time so she needs to give away some of the toys she already has. I think we’re covering enough to say that Christmas is alive and well in our household, despite the pots and pans stashed in random places all over the house.

Some years, Christmas doesn’t look like we think it should in our homes. Sometimes, the Christmas season collides with sickness, a major move, hard financial times, or a very non-essential home improvement project. So what do we do at those times? We throw away the magazines, delete the Pinterest app, do all our shopping online, and do the non-Christmas stuff that’s most pressing at the time.  Even though my house isn’t perfect, I have plenty around me to be mindful of what I should really get out of Christmas. It’s just one thing, and it’s The Gift. The Gift is pure, selfless love. And love isn’t tinsel-covered. It doesn’t usually come wrapped in trendy burlap and twine, or decorated in velvet and satin. The Gift is a heart gift, and it has nothing to do with our surroundings. Love looks like a mom cleaning up throw up for the fourth time in the night. Love looks like a husband making his wife overjoyed with a little paint and a lot of work hours. Love looks like staying within a budget, no matter how small, because you know that’s the best gift you can give your husband. Love looks like a lot of things.

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So whether your house looks like Santa’s elves themselves brought the Pottery Barn warehouse to your door, or whether your house is nowhere close to smelling like cinnamon and cloves (paint fume scented candle, anyone?), I hope we all can embrace the fact that Christmas doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what we see, but a lot to do with how we love, and Who loves all of us.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him, shall not perish but have eternal life.”