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!
Three beautiful things from my past week:
1. Neal, Chris, and I go out for supper.
2. Sergio and his wife hire a babysitter so she can make her work holiday party and he can come to our game. We appreciate his presence tremendously.
3. Rudi donated money to a friend’s son’s fundraiser and this week a box of assorted homemade cookies was delivered.
What’s been beautiful in your world lately?
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
   ~Copyright Susan CooperSo 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.
Technically, this was the Top Ten Tuesday topic for last week, but I missed it then. So, we’re getting it today instead!
Ten books I’m looking forward to reading this winter: