Welcome to the tenth day of the Virtual Advent Tour. Today I’m combining our holiday tour with That Artsy Reader Girl’s Top Ten Tuesday meme to share ten Christmas-themed books (spanning all age groups) that I recommend:

1. The Birds’ Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggins: This overly sentimental, melodramatic picture book tells the Victorian Era story of an ill girl, Carol, who invites the neighbor children, The Birds, to her Christmas Day birthday party. I wept buckets over this as a child and teen and would borrow it annually from the library in order to do so.
2. The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg: I first encountered this picture book in a French translation, which we read aloud my senior year of high school. Charming in any language, this story, about a boy who takes a train to the North Pole, ultimately is about faith and believing in the unseen, yet still known. The movie adaptation is also quite good.
3. A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas: This prose piece, a fictionalized memoir about a bygone Christmastime in a Welsh village, was originally written by one of the early 20th-century’s best poets as a radio broadcast. Sentimental without ever becoming sappy, this story is beautiful whether read on the page, listened to as read by its author, or seen performed by actors.
4. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson: I think, although I don’t remember for certain, that I saw a tv adaptation of this first and then discovered the book, but it could have been the other way around. Either way, this middle-grade novel focuses on the Herdmans, a poor family of under-supervised, over-bullying, mean children, who get it into their heads that they want to take over their local Sunday School production of the Nativity play.
5. Greenglass House by Kate Milford: In this fantastical middle-grade novel, a tween boy and his adoptive parents live in an old inn. Just as they’re closing up for the holidays, a series of strangers parade in and a snowstorm descends, and a mystery is set forward.
6. How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss: Converted into one of the 20th-century’s best loved holiday cartoons, this book is just as charming as its televised (and subsequent films) adaptation. In it, a hard-hearted grinch has had it with his neighbors’ over-exuberant merry-making and decides to ruin their holidays in order to get them to shut up about Christmas already.
7. My True Love Gave to Me, edited by Stephanie Perkins: In this series of romantic Christmas tales by some of the biggest stars in YA literature, you’ll find contemporary romances and historical fiction rubbing shoulders with fantasy and sci fi. In other words, there’s a story for everyone.
8. Let It Snow! by John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle: In this interlocking trio of stories/novellas (adapted into a charming Netflix film), a blizzard strikes the mid-Atlantic on Christmas Eve, stranding a train heading to Florida just outside Gracetown, Virginia. Included on the train are a horde of high school cheerleaders headed to a competition and two other solitary teenagers, Jeb and Jubilee. Independently, they all head to the Waffle House they can see from the train window through the night’s snow. The stories are what happens next.
9. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: We all know the bones of the story: a miser is visited by three Christmas spirits who attempt to get him to mend his ways and take a greater interest in his fellow man. But the details of the story often get glossed over in the tv adaptations, and it’s worth a return visit to the source material to see how the Victorian Era’s most beloved social crusader gets his message across.
10. A Redbird Christmas by Fannie Flagg: Typical of Flagg’s quirky small-town-centric novels, this novel focuses on a man who must move to the South for his health and the locals he encounters once he does so.

Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you tomorrow for our next door on the Virtual Advent Tour! (I’m a little behind in matching dates with folks who wrote to me over the weekend, but we do still have a couple openings if today is your first visit to our tour and you want to join in.)

Welcome back to the Virtual Advent Tour. We’ve reached Day 9, which means we’re more than a third of the way through the season!

Today, I’m sending you off to Beyond Strange New Words, where Jo Kay has a post for us about winter evenings. I’m nearly positive that Jo Kay is our only Tour participant this year writing from somewhere that’s not North America.

I hope you have a great Monday (there are only four more this year!), and I look forward to seeing you back here tomorrow.

(And to those of you who sent well-wishes for the party, thank you. I neither pretended to be out when our first guests arrived, nor burst into tears during the frenzied pre-party period, and the 30 people who crammed into our apartment seemed to enjoy themselves. Plus, I now have a nicely clean bathroom — although I did forget to put the soap back into the soap dish after I cleaned it, and no one mentioned it, so I didn’t discover that until the final guests had departed. Oh well…)

Behind door #8 on this year’s Virtual Advent Tour is a familiar shape. What’s this? I am totally recycling (and scheduling ahead) a post I’ve used in previous years. Why, you might ask?

When I decided to revive the Virtual Advent Tour, raidergirl3 told me to repeat content as needed to not feel burnt out. Today requires that advice.

My tree-trimming party is due to start in 10 hours and I am expecting to squeeze 30 people into my junior one-bedroom apartment. I am exhausted, but am not remotely ready. So, here we are.

How to throw a Christmas party:

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Welcome back to the Virtual Advent Tour! Today is the end of our first week, so I hope the season has been going well for you so far.

We are big music listeners in my family, and our tastes are broad, particularly at the holidays. My dad’s Christmas music collection numbers in the hundreds, and mine is catching up, having overflowed the milk crate I keep it in a few years back. In fact, while in New York last month, I bought a new Christmas cd based on nothing more than the fact that it was one.

As kids, we listened to vinyl and the mix tapes Dad made, and our favorites included his holiday recordings, which later moved to cd as the media changed.

For many years now, I’ve also made an annual Christmas cd. In fact, I wrote about my process for one of my very first Virtual Advent Tours, and I have shared songs off my cds on occasion over the years.

This year, I’ve been auditioning music intermittently since mid-November, but listened to quite a few tunes while working late earlier this week. While I may share some of the new songs I’m considering later in the tour, today I thought I’d give you a trio of the songs that made it onto last year’s cd.

First up we have The Sugarpills performing “Christmas Is the Time to Say I Love You,” originally written and recorded by Billy Squier. Their pared down version of the song gives it an earnestness I like:

Second, we have “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” performed by Miley Cyrus and Mark Ronson and featuring Sean Ono Lennon on the song his parents wrote:

Finally, we have Leilani and the Distractions with their klezmer adaptation of Johnny Marks’ “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I’m a sucker for reworkings and mashups of well-known songs, so my mixes often include at least one:

Today, we’ll be cleaning our apartment in preparation for our tree-trimming party on Sunday, and I’m looking forward to finally getting a chance to listen to Dad’s 2019 Christmas mix while I do it. I hope your Saturday also includes some musical highlights, however you prefer them.

I’ll see you back here tomorrow. Oh, and if you’d like to join in on the fun of the Virtual Advent Tour, leave me a comment and we can set you up with a date. We still have openings throughout the rest of Advent.

Welcome to Day 6 of the Virtual Advent Tour. Happy St. Nicholas Day! I hope he filled your shoes with treats!

Behind today’s calendar door we have a treat from raidergirl3 at an adventure in reading. She has a post for you about the fun ways she and her family are adding a little pizzazz to their holidays.

Thanks for stopping by and do come back tomorrow. If you’re interested in doing a post as part of Virtual Advent Tour, just leave me a note in the comments and I’ll get you set up. We still have some unclaimed dates available.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Many of the towns I drove through last Friday were putting the finishing touches on their holiday decorations, and I saw more than one cherry picker. This one reminded me of the reformed Bumble at the end of Rudolph.

2. Rudi and I caught a sneak preview of The Aeoronauts, which we loved, about a Victorian balloonist and the scientist who conceived of meteorology. The acting was great (Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne front the film), the script tight, and the movie should win awards for both cinematography and sound editing. If it interests you at all, make sure you see it in the theater, because no matter how good your tv is, it’s not going to compare.

3. We had the first snow of the season while we were up in New England. And then my parents had another foot after we left.

What’s been beautiful in your world lately?