Friends, we’ve made it. Done or not, we have reached the night before Christmas.

Thank you for coming along with us all these past 24 days. Thanks to Rudi, Marg, and raidergirl3 for their posts along the way.

Rudi and I drove north last night, which gave us a chance to listen to WXPN’s Robert Drake in his The Night Before The Night Before. We got the pre-show, but if you tune in to WXPN from Philadelphia anytime today, you’ll catch Drake’s main holiday show.

Another Christmas Eve tradition of mine is to watch Christmas Eve on Sesame Street:

If you don’t have time for the live broadcast, nor an hour for Jim Henson, may I offer Stan Rogers’ “At Last I’m Ready for Christmas,” which is far shorter:

If you celebrate, Merry Christmas. And if you don’t, peace on earth to us all.

Hey, folks!

Earlier this week, Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader posted about her most recent Christmas reads and invited me to share it on the Virtual Advent Tour. In response to her post, I thought I’d note down the holiday reads I’m either in the midst of or hoping to get to this season (through mid-January when our tree comes down):

Finished:

• A Holly Jolly Diwali, by Sonya Lalli, starts just before Diwali in the fall and carries through until Christmas (with a postlude set at the following Diwali), so I’m counting it. If you want an international romance, much of which takes place in India, and a multicultural approach to holidays, I encourage you to check it out.

Underway, but early days:

• The Mistletoe Motive by Chloe Liese is about rival booksellers, Gabriella di Natale and Jonathan Frost, at an indie shop that is threatened by a national chain, Potters. I’m early in, but expect lots of festive wordplay and allusions to favorite holiday books and movies.
• A Winter in New York by Josie Silver focuses on a young British woman who’s moved to New York after the end of a bad relationship and still reeling from her mother’s death. Then she finds out that her mother’s beloved and secret gelato recipe may have come from a city shop.

Still to come (let me know if I should prioritize any of these):

• Just Like Magic by Sarah Hogle
• A Merry Little Meet Cute by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone
• The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett
• Christmas at The Mysterious Bookshop, edited by Otto Penzler
• The Christmas Orphans Club by Becca Freeman
• Mrs. Jeffries and the Midwinter Murders by Emily Brightwell
• The Christmas Café by Eliza Evans
• The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore (my BFF gave me this years ago and I can remember reading the start of it on the metro and cannot tell you why I didn’t finish it. I’m assuming life and figure if ever there was a year to read a Christmas satire, 2023 is it.)

Today is the antepenultimate day of the Virtual Advent Tour for the year. To celebrate, we head back to The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader, where Marg has a post sharing the decorations she and her husband have added to their collection this year.

If you work a traditional job, good luck with the last day before the holiday!

Welcome to winter, my friends. As tonight marks the solstice, that makes today the shortest day, a perfect time to read this poem from Susan Cooper, the author of The Dark Is Rising series.

The Shortest Day
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp~Copyright Susan Cooper

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
The lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen,
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us — listen!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land.
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends, and hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year, and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Be safe and loved and rejoice in this shortest day and this longest night, for tomorrow we begin again our journey toward sunlight and warmth.

We’re into the final stretch now. Just a handful of days left of this year’s Virtual Advent celebration. And to keep us touring, here is a final post from Rudi at Random Duck about perchten, beings out of Austrian folklore.

Thanks for stopping by!

On this day 180 years ago, Chapman & Hall published Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The first printing sold out by Christmas Eve.

My dad loves this Dickens classic, and so we were exposed early. I was (and am) not a particular fan of ghost stories, so it took many years before I came to appreciate the original text, although I do have a fondness for some of the film and tv adaptations, especially Mr. Magoo’s:

We grew up listening to the old audio plays. This is the Campbell (of the soup fame) Playhouse version, with Lionel Barrymore as Ebenezer Scrooge and Orson Welles as the narrator:

If you’ve got some time to listen — wrapping presents maybe or baking or navigating traffic — here is Neil Gaiman reading the unabridged story from Dickens’ folio:

And if you are a lucky soul in New York City (know if I’d discovered this earlier, I’d have been on a train now!), Gaiman is doing a costumed reading at Town Hall tonight to benefit the New York Public Library, and tickets still seem to be available.