December Books, Day 27: The Light of Christmas, or, "What am I to say to the Froplinsons?"

Reading Lizzie's "Christmas treat" story on A Dusty Frame made me think of a Christmas anthology I inherited from my grandmother. The Light of Christmas was edited by Frances Brentano and published by Dutton in 1964. My copy is nothing much to look at--doesn't even have its dustjacket--and I can't find a photo online of what it originally looked like. But it's the inside that counts. It doesn't have Lizzie's story, but it has many more...some funny, some thoughtful.

The book starts with retellings of the birth of Christ--"The Inn That Missed Its Chance" by Amos Russel Wells, "Herod's Way" by Dorothy L. Sayers, and "Seeking the Light" by Henry van Dyke. The other sections include book excerpts, stories and poems by authors such as Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Ruth Sawyer, Margaret E. Sangster, John Masefield, Elizabeth Goudge, Bess Streeter Aldrich, G.K. Chesterton, Elizabeth Yates, and Hugh Walpole. And Saki.

"I don't dispute the necessity [of writing a thank-you note to the Froplinsons], but I don't think the someone should be me," said Janetta. "I wouldn't mind writing a letter of angry recrimination or heartless satire to some suitable recipient; in fact, I should rather enjoy it, but I've come to the end of my capacity of expressing servile amability. Eleven letters today and nine yesterday, all couched in the same strain of ecstatic thankfulness: really, you can't expect me to sit down to another. There is such a thing as writing oneself out."

"I've written nearly as many," said Egbert, "....Besides, I don't know what it was that the Froplinsons sent us."

"A William the Conqueror calendar," said Janetta, "With a quotation of one of his great thoughts for every day in the year."

"Impossible," said Egbert; "he didn't have three hundred and sixty-five thoughts in the whole of his life...."

"Well, it was William Wordsworth, then," said Janetta; "I knew William came into it somewhere."--Saki, "Down Pens"

There's also "The Chanukah Bush" by Gertrude Berg.

And Pearl S. Buck's "Christmas Day in the Morning."

And Myra Scovel's story "Christmas Cookies," about a Christmas that their family spent in China under Japanese occupation.

And Walter Hard's poem "Holy Night," which brings us back to Lizzie's story.

"But he told her she'd got to stop this sharing.
She'd promised.
But she couldn't bear to think of those Stebbinses.
She could get along. She still had wood in the shed.
The Doctor's scolding stuck in his throat.
He went to the shed and brought in the last armful of wood.

He shut the stable door.
he stopped to look down on the sleeping village.
So Ellen had to share.
He recalled the look on her face.
Sharing. That was what Christmas meant.

The dlock in the village struck twelve.
Down in the valley a rooster crowed.
Overhead the moon moved slowly across the winter sky.
Holy night. Peaceful night."