Time to get out your Creche!

This past Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent. In our home, that means it’s time to get out the manger scene. We put everything out, minus the baby Jesus (he’s added after Mass on Christmas Eve). At a local used book sale this year, I picked up book that I hoped would be a [...]

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Candy Cane Update

I previously reviewed a book about the legend of the candy cane. The gist of it is that book had a good idea but the storytelling was lacking.  Well, I found a better option for those wanting to learn about the legend of the candy cane.  This one is creative, weaves a story around one [...]

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Three Trees

I’m not even sure how this book showed up on my library search for Christmas books, but I’m glad it did, anyway. Angela Elwell Hunt has retold a traditional folktale called The Tale of Three Trees. It’s a wonderful, little story about 3 trees who had wishes to be great things and ended up each [...]

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Hee Haw!

We watched the season’s obligatory It’s a Wonderful Life on tv the other night.  At the friends’ every mention of “hee-haw” I was reminded that I had gotten a Christmas book out of the library and hadn’t yet read it to the kids.  We remedied that yesterday and even made a school lesson out of [...]

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A new spin on the nativity story

This nativity story focuses on a legend about the gift of a particular spider.  The Cobweb Curtain:  A Christmas Story by Jenny Koralek, is not the typical nativity story.  It begins with the birth of the baby Jesus, and tells how the holy family fled out of the city to escape Herod’s wickedness.  A shepherd [...]

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Silent Night

Last night we read another of Margaret Hodges great legend books.  Silent Night:  The Song and its Story is about how the much-loved Christmas carol was written and how its popularity spread. We read about a little church in Austria whose organ bellows breaks just before Christmas Eve Mass.  The priest sets about writing a [...]

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Candy Cane not quite

I’ve had this book on our Christmas reading list for quite a while, but it wasn’t until this year when we moved to a new library system that I was able to check it out.  The Legend of the Candy Cane:  The Inspirational Story of Our Favorite Christmas Candy had the potential of being a [...]

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The Last Straw

The first book in my reviews of Advent and Christmas reading is one of my personal favorites. The Last Straw is a story about a grumpy, proud old camel, Hoshmakaka.  He is given the job of carrying the gifts of the three wise kings to the newborn baby Jesus.  But, he’s a grumpy camel and [...]

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