Save Little Christmas. Give books.

I didn’t get a single book this Christmas.  Not counting Garry Trudeau’s book of satirical Twitter posts, My Shorts R Bunching. Thoughts?: The Tweets of Roland Hedley. Which is fun but I have to be careful and read it in short snatches because it’s already had way too much influence on my own tweeting, as you can tell.

I’m not complaining, exactly.  It was just an unusual Christmas that way.  Every other Christmas I can remember Santa managed to leave at least one book under the tree for me.

This year he probably figured I’ve got a big enough stack of unread books on my desk, I don’t need to add to it.  It’s probably unsafe to add to it.  It’s three feet high, halfway to the ceiling from the top of the desk and not built for stability.  Still, I wouldn’t have minded adding Pops, Terry Teachout’s new biography of Louis Armstrong.

But maybe a bookless Christmas was Santa’s way of leaving coal in my stocking.  Finish the ones you have, was his message, then we’ll discuss next year.

The blonde has always been good about her books.  She reads every new one she gets her hands on right away.  So Santa brought her Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, and the boys gave her the latest Wallander paperback, The Pyramid, which contains the first Wallander stories, first in the sense of being set earlier in Wallander’s career, before the novel sequence begins, before Wallander became as utterly miserable as his fans have gotten to know him, not in the sense of having been written first.

They gave Pop Mannion How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by scientist and blogger Chad Orzell.

Ken and Oliver made out like bandits, book-wise, themselves.  Plus they each received a Barnes and Noble gift certificate from their respective Secret Santas among their cousins.  Books are all Ken asked for for Christmas this year.  His haul includes too many to list here, but he’s halfway through the copy of Stephen King’s Under the Dome his grandparents gave him.

Oliver received two books by one of his new intellectual heroes, Shelby Foote---Shiloh and Stars in Their Courses : The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863 .  But he’s been reading a book he plucked without causing a collapse from my tottering tower on the desk, Idiot America , by another of his new intellectual heroes, Charles Pierce.

Still, I’m not jealous.  I’m not.  I’m really not.

But this bookless Christmas has---

I am NOT jealous!

Sheesh.

Some people.

Where was I?

Oh yeah.

This bookless Christmas had given me an idea.  It’s an idea that proceeds from the fact that Christmas is not over.

Ever since I was a kid it’s bothered me that Christmas shuts down right on December 25.  Go into a drug store on the 26th, The Feast of Stephen, when good King Wenceslas looked down, and you’ll find the clerks hurriedly putting out the Valentine’s cards and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate.  In other stores the Christmas decorations are coming down and the carols have stopped playing and the clerks, if they can muster any left over holiday cheer, are half-heartedly wishing customers a happy New Year.

And this is with eleven more days of Christmas to go!

Plus the Feast of the Three Kings, Little Christmas!

And in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Christmas itself is celebrated on January 7.

Christmas isn’t over when it’s over.

It shouldn’t be, at any rate.

Perhaps I took the song too much to heart.  More than likely I was overly influenced by Dickens.  In A Christmas Carol the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge through all twelve days of Christmas and finally leaves him outside a Twelfth Night party for the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to find.

For as long as I can remember it’s been my mission in life to persuade my friends and family to keep their Christmas spirits up all twelve days and to celebrate Twelfth Night and Little Christmas.  This never completely caught on at Mom and Pop Mannions’ house.  For some reason Mom Mannion thought we kids didn’t need any more presents.  I always argued that more didn’t have to be the point.  We could just save some of the boring gifts---clothes---and maybe one toy to open on January 5 or 6.  I never won this argument.  But some years, if the Epiphany fell on a Saturday or Sunday, Mom would indulge me by making a big dinner and inviting my grandparents over.

This has more or less been the case here at our house, although the blonde, like Mom Mannion, never seems quite as enthusiastic about more cooking and more visitors so soon after New Year’s.

This year, however, I think my new idea will get her a little more excited.

I propose that the celebration of Twelfth Night and Little Christmas be marked by the giving of a few simple gifts.

That is, books.

I suggest that everybody give to a select small group of nearest and dearest one book each.  Hardcover or paperback.  New or used.

Who’s with me?

I’m convinced that if the printing press had been invented the Wise Men wouldn’t have bothered with their gold, frankisncense, and myrrh but would have given the Baby Jesus Pat the Camel, Goodnight Wandering Star, and If You Give a Mouse a Matzoh.

And, no, this isn’t a sneaky plot to make up for Santa’s omission.

So…what about you?

What books would you give?  What books would you like to be given?  What books did you get.

I AM NOT JEALOUS!

____________________

Looking for suggestions?  People pay Maud Newton to read books.  Which is smart of them because Maud is a fine writer of reviews of books she’s been paid to read.  Maud’s posted a list of her favorites among the books she was paid to read (not that she really needed to be paid to want to read them) and ones she read on her own for the sheer love of it over the past year.

Maud was also one of the authors Salon asked to recommend one special book.  Maud’s recommendation is very interesting.

Comments

[El Jefe]

Twelve Days FTW!

As a cook at heart, I've always liked dragging out the feast days as long as possible, As a lapsed historian, someone bugged by the Crachit-like pre-Christmas grind (I can trace an arc from the many batches of Christmas cookies my mother turned out in December during my Seventies childhood -- and she was a professor faced with exam-grading time at a small college -- and the start of high school in the mid-Eighties when we first began baking after Christmas), and someone whose youngest daughter was born on Epiphany, I'm on the bandwagon. Now you just need to cook up some line about honoring the logic of the feast for the boys' sake, part of that catechistic education after all, about presenting gifts that recognize a person's nature, and you're golden ....

[El Jefe]

I can also claim to be disinterested (in the correct sense) in your plight because I got Unseen Academicals and the three cookbooks that I really, really wanted (including the rather magnificent Illustrated Encyclopedia of British Cooking, yes I *am* a hardcore foodways type) on the first day. The Stilton-and-leek tart on Boxing Day rocked, btw.

[Linkmeister]

Rec'd:

The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, by Douglas Brinkley

The Best American Travel Writing, edited by Simon Winchester.

Given:

The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. I think this is the one I gave my sister; it was wrapped so quickly the cover hasn't stuck in my mind.

[PurpleGirl]

The Rector of St. Thomas Church (Episcopal) reminded people in his Christmas morning sermon that we could take Christmas to February 2nd (Candlemas Day).

I bought myself a book with a friend's (birthday) gift -- a book of finishing techniques and ideas for crochet work.

[KLG]

Shelby Foote and Charlie Pierce! This Oliver Mannion is a young person to get to know. The Shiloh and Gettysburg sections are great but someone should find him a 3-volume set. They are available, cheap, and repay re-reading every few years. Foote on historical fiction: Why make it up when there is no way to improve on what actually happened...

[Beel]

Phillip Roth's "The Plot Against America" came my way just before Christmas, and I just finished it (just after Christmas the 25th). I highly recommend this book to anyone. Its portrait of family life is marvelous. And it does illustrate how close real history can be to alternative black holes.

[Maud]

Lance, I have stacks and stacks of review copies sitting here. I wish I could transport them to you somehow.

[actor212]

First, move to a Greek or Russian Orthodox neighborhood, and you get your twelve extra days.

Second, I got the new Paul McCartney biography. I'd link it, but I don't recommend it.

[Doug K]

we are Greek Orthodox, I applaud your idea ;-)

Gave "A Time for Silence", Patrick Leigh Fermor, to my wife, as she has been visiting monasteries lately. I hope not to lose her to the allure of silence..
The Orthodox church has male and female monks, without distinction. It's odd since the church doesn't allow female priests.

Received none, though I bought other PL Fermors for myself. This is probably due to having moved house with too many books in the recent painful past.

The boys got Amazon gift cards but they are plotting to buy an iPod Touch with them. Humph.