is posting The Snowy Day. And actually, we already have a snow day declared with no school here tomorrow! Here's hoping we have a big dramatic storm that harms no one and keeps us cozy inside, making cookies for Friday's Valentine's Party at preschool, filling out invitations for my 3 yo's upcoming birthday party, making bird feeders, etc, etc, etc...(as you can see, it's very hard for me to relax...).

I just love The Snowy Day and how it so perfectly captures the excitement and wonder of a snowy day, the thrill upon waking up and finding the world covered in a blanket of white and the awe with which young Peter goes out and explores his world, now completely transformed. The joy he finds in making footprints and snow angels, smacking a snow covered tree and the fervent wish that he can bring a piece of the day indoors and hold it forever (I cannot tell you how many snowballs my mother let me store in the freezer...). I love reading this book to my son. If you haven't read it yourself, or with your children, do so immediately!

When I first heard the premise behind Dolen Perkins-Valdez's novel Wench, I couldn't believe it - a resort where slaveowners would retreat with the slave women they owned - how could this be true? So I was so pleased when Perkins-Valdez agreed to write a guest post explaining her novel's real-life inspiration and its fictional evolution. USA Today said "Like The Help, Wench immerses readers in its characters' complex emotional lives" and the novel has been praised in O, Essence and People magazine. Be sure to visit Perkins-Valdez's site for more information and to catch her on tour near you and follow her on Twitter. Read on for the fascinating story behind Wench.

Recently, someone came to dinner at my house and after viewing the wall of bookshelves in my living room, asked me: "Have you read ALL of these books?" I was tickled by this question because when I was growing up, my parents lined the wall of my bedroom with bookshelves. And my friends would ask me that very same question. I think I've been asked that question my entire life.

I came to writing as a reader, as a lover of the written word. Many writers come to storytelling as readers. My story is no different from theirs, I suppose. I believe in the power of narrative to help us make sense of our existence. I believe that narrative is as integral to saving our lives as modern medicine. Whether the writing be poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction, serious or funny, it is crucial to our understanding of ourselves as human beings. It is this belief that keeps me writing, even without the prospect of publication. My desire has always been to leave behind a record of my existence in written form, even if that were an unpublished manuscript that no one ever read.

When I wrote Wench, I tried my best to write a novel that I would want to read as a reader. I have a reading chair at home, and with a good book and a stretch of time, I can disappear into that chair.  That's what I hope my book does for readers.

Some writers begin their stories with a character.  Others begin with a fantastic line. I began Wench when I stumbled upon a fascinating footnote of history. While reading a biography of W.E.B. DuBois, I learned that during the 1850s, there was a summer resort near Xenia, Ohio notorious for its popularity among slaveholders and their enslaved mistresses. I was stunned to learn this little-known historical fact. I decided to do a bit of historical excavation and learn more. At the time, it was very popular among the country's elite to visit natural springs. This particular resort opened in 1852, and became popular among southern slaveholders and their enslaved mistresses. I knew that Ohio was a free state and many of the northerners were abolitionists. Yet I was fascinated to learn that because they did not enjoy vacationing with the southerners and their slave entourages, they stopped coming and business declined. The place closed in 1855.

Most slaves did not leave written historical records. Yet I found myself entering an imaginative territory that would prove to be much more fertile than documents. I began by asking myself the following questions: If the women entered free territory, why wouldn't they attempt to escape? Is it possible that they actually loved the men? As I made my way through draft after draft, I discovered that these were not questions easily answered. Even the answers I thought I would find turned out to be much more complicated than I'd imagined. The attachments these women had to their masters had many layers. As I approached the end of the novel, I myself did not know how my main character Lizzie would end it all. The journey of writing the book was probably as emotional for me as it has been for the readers who have e-mailed me about their captivating reading experiences of it.

One question many people have about Wench is whether or not my character Lizzie was in love with her master Drayle. I don't know the answer to this question. I believe that love in the context of slavery is very, very difficult to draw a box around. Not only is it complicated in matters between slaves and their masters, but also between slaves and other slaves. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote, "O love is the crooked thing. There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it." If this is true in contexts outside of enslavement, surely it is even more so in the context of the "peculiar institution."

Today Laken talks about growing up reading in secret, the lure of libraries and her ideal book club. Which led me to wonder, what would my ideal book club look like? Actually, I think it would be pretty close to the one that I have, so I feel lucky, but I am drawn to her idea of a multigenerational group. Think about what your dream book club would look like--it can be the one you're in now, or one you wish to be in. Post a comment about it and I'll choose one random winner from all the comments received by midnight Friday February 5th to win a copy of Dream House.

I grew up in the days before book clubs, in a town where people talked about trucks, not books, in a house that had a lot of nice stuff, but not very many bound pages with words on them. There were four built-in book shelves in our family room that my mother — a reluctant decorator, suspicious of trinkets — seemed to regard as a personal trial.

Over the years, the shelves filled up somehow, in the way that any storage device will fill up. The top shelf went to her prized collection of model horses from childhood. On the two lower shelves books with functions accumulated: tax books, textbooks, Dale Carneggie’s self-help, and one untouched copy of our lone parenting book — whose cover featured a naked woman breastfeeding, horrifying me. There were some books my sister had made in grade school, a big falling-apart dictionary, and squeezed in there somewhere, my parents’ lone novel: a ragged copy of The Marathon Man, with Dustin Hoffman on the cover.

But the pièce de résistance, the thing my mom polished and beamed over and would jump up from the dinner table to consult, was a generic red encyclopedia set that she got for free at our grocery store, one volume per week with each cart of groceries. (We never got F, though. We were on vacation the week of F.)

The remaining shelf, just under the horses and out of our reach, held the most mysterious volumes: old yearbooks and photo albums showing impossible things like my mother in a bikini on a beach before I knew her, looking more carefree than she had ever seemed in my presence. She was a cheerful, intensely efficient mother of four girls born almost all in a row. She tutored high schoolers and helped run my dad’s business and kept the house as clean and uncluttered as a hotel room. Books, we gathered, were made for idle people, and idle people were not much championed in our house.

Still, as a former math teacher she understood the value of books, at least in the abstract. She read to us when we were little and let us order one book each whenever the Scholastic Books catalog showed up at school – which was more than a lot of parents did. And every Friday she took us all the way downtown to the Rockford Public Library. This was in the days before anyone much talked about child predators, so we were allowed to roam the entire four floors on our own. There were window nooks to curl into, footstools to kick around and climb on, and stacks of books that towered above us and hid us.

There was a silence you just don’t find in a house with four kids. Best of all: inside those walls everyone was a reader. An unashamed, out-of-the-closet reader. This was my first inkling of a book club, my first assurance that I was not alone.

In fact, one of my sisters was (and remains) an avid reader, but like me she tended to do it in secret. Under covers, behind armchairs, in the back part of the basement. It wasn’t that anyone would scold us or stop us; I’m not sure why we hid our habit. Maybe because reading in the presence of nonreaders is like bringing a skeptic to church. Sure, it might be a good idea, but somehow it strains that slender bridge that carries you from your real world to the other.

As we got older, that sister and I passed books back and forth, reporting on our findings and favorites, while my other two sisters built lives more productive, more normal. I sought out other readers, those deviants lurking in libraries, English classes and bookstores, but I never could quite shake my habit of reading in secret. Even talking about books I love feels dangerous, makes me anxious and tongue-tied. The fact that I teach English has not in the least resolved this.

But still, I have a fantasy about finding a book club in which my anxieties fall away: there’d be good snacks and a good view and a good deal of wine, and no one would mind if you showed up in your sweat pants, possibly even unshowered. There’d be two or three generations on hand, male and female, each with a ravaged copy of a great new book and no fear of having to sound smart when they talked about it. There would be so many of us that we would crowd the room and line up out the door till we were all filled with the temporary conviction that everyone in the world was like us. These, the great idle dreamers, the people who lounge for hours with books, lost to this world and committed to the other. That’s my club.

BEA, aka Book Expo America, is a convention I've attended for several years in my role at HarperCollins, so unlike most book bloggers, last year was not my first BEA, but it was the first BEA I was excited about in a long time. Why? Well, because for the first time, there was a sizable number of new people attending the convention who are excited about books, who read them in great numbers, who buy them in perhaps even greater numbers (those TBR piles always outweigh the "have reads"), and even better than that? They recommend them to literally thousands of people through their ever-increasing network of readers of their blogs, followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook and more. Book Bloggers arrived at the 2009 BEA and it was FANTASTIC to have their energy injected into the event.

I was lucky enough last year to moderate a panel of book bloggers and we were overwhelmed at the response - the room was packed with publishers, booksellers, authors and other bloggers and the spirited conversation clearly indicated that there is much that all of us need to discuss and understand about how we all work and how we can all work better together.

So, do I think book bloggers should attend BEA? Absolutely. And do I think they should further attend this year's inaugural Book Blogger Convention that will take place on Friday, May 28th immediately following the convention? Without a doubt. If last year's event taught us anything, and if ongoing conversation on Twitter and the blogs prove, bloggers have so much to learn from each other and the connections we can all make at BEA and the BBC are so valuable. And it looks like one can now sign up for BEA and the BBC in one fell swoop, check out the official site for details.

The organizers of the Book Blogger Convention asked several of us to share our tips for bloggers coming to NY and to BEA. Candace at Beth Fish Reads set the bar high with her advice today, and I hope I don't repeat too many of them here - but hers were all so good! Here are mine:

1) Plan to meet up with a few blogging friends you know and a few you only know via the blogosphere and Twitter. Better yet, plan a meet up before BEA starts. Going in with some friends already made can really enhance your show and you'll help each other find all the best giveaways and signings.

2) Get business cards made up. The publishers and authors you'll talk to will want a way to reach you, and cards are the best way to pass along your information.

3) Let publishers and authors know you have a blog when you talk to them and let them know what, if anything, you specialize in and what you're looking for. 

4) Be discriminate in the books and galleys you grab. At your first show, you'll tend to pick up nearly everything in sight. You'll soon be weighed down with far more than you carry. Try to take just what interests you and you'll be thankful for the more judicious selection.

5) If you can't hold back, be assured that the convention center does have a facility for mailing packages home to yourself so you don't have to haul everything around.

6) Tweet and blog about your day for those of your blogging and twittering friends who can't attend the show - they will want to hear about what you're doing and they'll learn from your experiences as well.

7) Attend panels and speak up! You are the new voices spreading the word about books and publishers and authors want and need to hear from you!

8) Set a night aside to do something very New York - go to a Broadway show, see some music or go out to dinner at a fabulous restaurant (or, all of the above). Sign up for the Broadway Box newsletter now to get tips on discounts on all sorts of shows, on Broadway and off.

9) Set an afternoon aside to take a literary pilgrimage - chances are one of your favorite authors spent some time in NY - find out where they lived, ate and drank, and go on a literary journey. (makes a great blog post upon your return home!)

10) Have fun! This is work, but it's also an incredible opportunity surround yourself with people who, like you, love books!

Be sure to check out the other bloggers participating in this blog tour about BEA and the BBC, including Dawn at She is Too Fond of Books, who is also posting today, and I hope to see you at both shows!

In The Weight of Heaven, Umrigar tells the story of Frank and Ellie Benton, whose lives are shattered after the loss of their only child, seven-year-old Benny to a sudden illness. Filled with wrenching memories, their Ann Arbor home becomes unbearable, and their marriage founders. Then an unexpected job half a world away in Girbaug, India, offers them an opportunity to start again. But Frank's befriending of Ramesh—a bright, curious boy who quickly becomes the focus of his attentions—will lead the grieving man down an ever-darkening path with stark repercussions.

A devastating look at cultural clashes and divides, Thrity Umrigar's The Weight of Heavenis a rare glimpse of a family and a country struggling under pressures beyond their control.

Browse inside the book, check out the reading group guide and Thrity's website, and set your reminder for the show on the 23rd here. The first 10 people who comment that they'd like to participate in the show will receive a copy of The Weight of Heaven to read before the show!

Each year Reading Group Choices, the site of amazing resources for book clubs, (not to mention their newsletter of the same name and wonderful annual print publication), surveys reading groups about their favorite books of the year, their habits, etc. As an added incentive, everyone who takes the survey is entered to win $75 that you can spend on food, books, whatever your group decides! I just took the survey myself and can attest that it only takes a few minutes to complete and it was interesting to revisit my group's favorites of the past year.

As an added incentive to take the survey, I have 5 copies of Reading Group Choices 2010 - their annual booklet of wonderful book recommendations to give away! To enter to win, take the survey and then leave a comment here that you've done so. I'll choose 5 random winners from all entries received by midnight Sunday, January 24th.

No, that's not painted on the roof of Deep Valley High (with an underscore of tar beneath it to keep brave Zetamathians from attempting to wash it off). That is in fact, the headline to this post because the winners of Betsy-Tacy Convert Week are the Philomathians! I have been a tad remiss in not naming the winning society sooner, but hey, Betsy was a procrastinator too, so I'm in good company.

Congratulations Philos, for converting more new fans to Betsy-Tacy! As I mentioned when I announced the final outcome to the Maud L list serv, it wasn't quite the blowout I thought, but it was, in fact, a definitive win. And of course the real winners are Betsy-Tacy fans everywhere - old ones who know that they've helped to spread the word about our beloved tomes and new fans who are enjoying the books for the first time!

Thank you to everyone who participated in Betsy-Tacy Convert Week. A paver stone in honor of the Philomathians will be placed outside Maud Hart Lovelace's home on "Hill Street" that will read:

Philomathians
Convert Week
Winners Fall 09

Poor old Zets... and, to that end, if you feel like commemorating your efforts Zetamathians (and I count myself among you, sniff), you can order your own paver here!

New (and old) fans remember to renew your membership to the Betsy-Tacy Society and go here to find a local Betsy-Tacy group near you! I'm very much looking forward to dinner with some NewBetsys (of New England) this weekend during the American Library Association's mid-winter meeting!

When my friend, Book Club Girl, asked me to come up with a reading list for a year of book club reads, I thought, “Oh easy. I just wrote Don’t Know Much About Literature with my daughter Jenny Davis. I can come up with twelve great books.”

But then I started to think about the question and it became daunting. Should they be Great Books?  Must reads? My favorites?  I’m a historian–should it be a whole list of historical fiction? What if they hate everything I suggest?

In a panic, with the choices threatening to overwhelm me, I hit on some ground rules.

I had to love the books. And, I didn’t want them all to be historical fiction. But as a historian, I thought that some of them should have a little historical flavor.  I also tried to avoid the obvious, so I wouldn’t recommend anything that too many people have already read. And I wanted to keep them on the shorter side: all but two are under 300 pages. No War and Peace here.

Then I thought it would be fun to connect them to the calendar. So here are my twelve: Each book celebrates the birth month of an author, a holiday or some other event connected to that month. Like most such lists,  this one is very arbitrary. These are all among my favorite authors and books, with a mix of classic and contemporary. So, Book Club Girl, here goes--

January
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (born January 24, 1862).  When I was in school, Edith Wharton was not in vogue That has changed.  The Age of Innocence is as timely today as in 1920 when it first appeared and won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, the first won by a woman. Juicy buzz: I don’t watch “Gossip Girl,” but its creator reportedly modeled that series on Wharton’s novel of turn of the century New York society.

February
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (born February 2, 1882). Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel is simply the most influential book I ever read. (Alternate: Dubliners, a collection of short stories including the great novella The Dead.)

March
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, in honor of International Women’s Day (March 8).  The 1983 Pulitzer and National Book Award winner is the story of a woman in the 1930s Deep South, told through her letters and diary entries. One of the best books I have read in the last 30 years.

April
The Natural by Bernard Malamud (born April 26, 1914). April might be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot said. But it also means baseball season and Book Club Girl’s World Champion Yankees take the field. So it’s only natural to read one of the best novels set in the world of baseball.  (Alternate: Malamud’s The Fixer)

May
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is my birthday month, so as a present to myself, I will pick one of my favorite books that has nothing to do with May. Turned into a memorable Merchant-Ivory film, it is the story of a proper butler in a British aristocratic household in the years leading up to World War II.  A contemporary masterpiece.

June  
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. May closes with Memorial Day, a holiday inspired by the Civil War, and the battle of Gettysburg was fought over the first three days in July. That makes June a good month to read this Pulitzer-winning novelistic retelling of the events at Gettysburg in 1863.

August
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.  No brief description does justice to a sweeping allegorical novel that commences with the births of some highly unusual children at the moment India gains its independence on August 15, 1947. One of the great books of our times, I had the privilege of reviewing it for Publishers Weekly as young, aspiring writer.

September
Ken Kesey (born September 17, 1935). A tossup here between One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Sometimes a Great Notion. Go with Cuckoo’s Nest if you haven’t read it or only seen the movie.

October
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie (born October 7, 1966).  Born and raised on the Spokane Indian Reservation, Alexie is a highly praised poet, novelist  and filmmaker. This is a collection of his stories. (Alternate: Reservation Blues).

November
Blindness by José Saramago (born November 16, 1922)  Saramago is Portuguese and won the Nobel prize in 1998. This is his most famous book – the story of a city in which suddenly and without explanation, people go blind. It is dazzling. (If you have time, add this short story by Irwin Shaw: “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” a perfect story set in New York on a November day.)

December
Very torn here. Willa Cather was born this month. How about O, Pioneers? But there’s no Dickens. There should be Dickens. And I left off Of Human Bondage. But in honor of Christmas, I suggest reading Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. And since that is so short, you can also read Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms.

What else did I leave out? No Updike, Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor, Dos Passos. Oh well, wait until next year.

Adriana Trigiani's New York Times bestseller Very Valentine, the first book in her new series about shoemaker Valentine Roncalli, goes on sale in one week in paperback and she'll be going on tour to promote it. Catch her at a store near you!

January 4th -- Warwick's in San Diego
January 5th -- Book Passage in San Francisco
January 6th -- Vroman's in Pasadena
January 19th -- Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, MA

Very Valentine in paperback includes a bonus recipe section and a sneak peek to the next book in the series, where Valentine's adventure continues, Brava, Valentine. Browse inside Very Valentine, listen to my Book Club Girl on Air Show with Adriana, check out the reading group guide and become a fan of Adriana's on Facebook and follow her on Twitter!

And if Adriana is not coming near you for her paperback tour, check out her tour for Brava, Valentine, which goes on sale on February 9th!

Like Adriana Trigiani and Katrina Kittle, the decorating for me is key. I have more boxes of ornaments and decorations (and have for years) than really makes sense and they're filled with treasures that I love. My mantlepiece is adorned with Shiny Brite houses, greenery, lights and brass stocking holders. I have a special fondness for snowmen, so there is a disprportionate number of them on my tree as well. A snowman garland is hung over the entry to the dining room, and a retro snowman candleabra sits atop the television. Carolers sit on top the china cabinet in the dining room, along with a ceramic Christmas tree that reminds me of the one my mother has.

There are mountains of presents underneath the tree already and tonight, after a dinner of lasagna and a candlelight service at church, we'll come home and the kids will each open one present -- new jammies that they'll immediately put on in the living room. Then they'll hang their stockings and leave cookies and eggnog for Santa. We have a split household of believers and non believers (having a 1 yo, 3 yo, 14 yo and 17 yo), so we'll get the little ones to bed and shoo the older ones away so that Daddy and I can stuff their stockings. We then haul out the "Santa" presents. These are unwrapped and go in front of the tree, each kid has a little section and pile of their own. My mother told me when I was older how difficult it was to determine which presents would be the Santa ones and I could never understand -- it seemed easy, they're presents you don't have to wrap! But now that I'm constructing the scene myself, I completely understand, and it's especially hard to determine Santa presents for the older girls. For the younger ones it will be dollies and trucks and toys that they''ll dive upon as they enter the living room.

And as for that -- we have a strict rule on Christmas morning. No one can go downstairs until we all go down. Daddy or I go down to turn on the heat, set out the coffee cake and the coffee, while the children wait impatiently at the top of the stairs. I love their faces as they come down the stairs, the anticipation is palpable. Upon entering the living room, chaos rules as they each claim their territory in front of the tree and unwrap to their hearts content. At some point Daddy is called up to tackle packaging, insert batteries, and generally get things to go. My husband and I will end up with a pile of gifts still to open, as we spend so much time observing others. This is another thing I never understood growing up, why my parents didn't open as feverishly as we did. Now, of course I understand completely the joy of watching your child's face as they open something they love. (and thus, on this Christmas night, our stockings are still hanging and we've yet to dive into them).

A Christmas quirk of mine is that I hate sunny Christmases. I think it stems partly from my desire for it to be snowing on Christmas. Also, I feel the day is so amazing anyway that sun always seems like overkill to me. (I may be partly English in this respect, as in general, I prefer an overcast day to a sunny one). So, because of this, in case of sun, I require the curtains in the living room be shut. This leads to low-level irritation on my husband's part that we don't have enough light for the photos. Luckily this Christmas turned out to have just the lack of light I require outside, so I did relent and allow the curtains to be opened at some point in the afternoon.

After the unwrapping (which goes so quickly!) we clean up and loll about, the kids playing with all their new treasures. At some point I'll haul myself to the kitchen to start cooking - butternut squash, mashed potatoes, turkey, cornbread stuffing (ok, I'm making that today). My in laws will bring the traditional Puerto Rican pernil and Spanish rice. At dinner we'll open Christmas crackers - a tradition that began after my sister and I each studied in England in college. We'll put on our crowns and tell each other the silly jokes and fortunes that come inside the crackers. My favorite part of the day, or maybe my second favorite, is the late afternoon or evening when there is nothing that I HAVE to do. We'll probably be visited by relatives at some point and do some catching up, munch on cookies, drink wine, enjoy some Stilton Watercress spread and, at some point, Skype with my parents in NH.

I hope that everyone had a very, very Merry Christmas!

This is my second Christmas without my mother.

She died suddenly on a January morning after one last holiday season with our family. It was a shock. It was too soon. I wasn’t ready. When I went home for her funeral, I stood in my sister’s arms, in the kitchen of our childhood and cried like I’ve never cried before. It was a stop all the clocks moment, where the familiar contents of that room - the shining chrome stovetop, the set of songbird coffee mugs, the scalloped copper hood on the exhaust fan circa 1973, the battered countertop caddy bursting with wooden spoons, wire whisks and rubber spatulas – all seemed to say that it couldn’t be true, that any moment now our mother was going to walk through the door, put her hands on her hips and teasingly say, “Snap out of it, girls. There’s work to be done.”

In the sadness of the days that followed, reminders of her came to me like messengers from the past - some easy and kind, others unexpected, yet still comforting. While searching for a mixing bowl in my parents’  pantry, I discovered a Tupperware tub half full of cookies that she’d tucked away (as she’d always done in Christmases past) so she and Dad could have a sweet or two with their morning coffee after the kids and grandchildren had cleared out after New Years. Fumbling through a cupboard for a bottle of Tylenol, my fingers found the butter spotted envelope where Mom kept her collection of Christmas recipes.

She was the Queen of Christmas. She adored the sparkle and hopefulness of the season, sewing sweet dresses for her girls from velvet and lace, trimming the tree from top to bottom, carrying armfuls of poinsettias into the house.

I opened the envelope and shuffled through the pile of index cards. Seeing her handwriting reduced me to tears yet again. Aunt Cleo’s Lemon Squares (with a note: “these don’t store well, so make them last.”) Butter Cookies for my grandmother’s old metal cookie press – “don’t let go too brown.” And the long, involved instructions for making Lebkuchen, a recipe that had been passed down from her beloved grandmother. Attached to the recipe for the Lebkuchen was a list of eleven tips, (equal to the number of cups of flour required to make the cookies.) Tip number five warned, “Don’t make this on a day that you just cleaned the kitchen.”

Grandma Tilly’s Lebkuchen had helped me battle the terrible bouts of morning sickness that had accompanied both my pregnancies. The second time around, I hadn’t even told Mom I was expecting when she showed up at my house on a hot July day with a tin of the magical cookies. “I thought you might be needing these,” she’d said with a knowing smile.

This year I bought all the ingredients to make Tilly’s Lebkuken, (a task I’ve never tackled without Mom by my side.) I brought everything home from the store- the molasses, the raisins, the sugar, the flour, the lemon peel – and put it away in the cupboard. Then I stood there thinking, “What are you doing? You’re no Queen of Christmas.”

It was true. I could never hope to make Christmas like my mother did. Despite her love of all things Yuletide, I always preferred the shadows of the season. I cared for the ghosts in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol far more than Tiny Tim. I relished the part in the nativity story where the angel made the shepherds sore afraid. Even my favourite Christmas carol, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” is in a minor key.

Mom knew this about me and never seemed to mind. She went on her merry way and simply said “to each her own.” I realize now, it was her joy in embracing the season that allowed me to revel in the dark.

As I look around my kitchen this morning I see it’s in no danger of having just been cleaned. It’s as good a day as any to give the Lebkuchen a try. Somehow Mom’s voice is pushing into my head, working to replace my doubts. “Snap out of it and roll up your sleeves. Bake the cookies or don’t – just make Christmas your own.”

My book club first started meeting in January some years ago, so it was a year before we had to face the what-if-anything-to-do-for-the holidays thing. Like most clubs, we spend one evening a month discussing a book we’ve all read, and we do love that, but by the time our first holiday together rolled around it seemed not quite festive enough for what had evolved from a disjointed collection of neighbor acquaintances into a gathering of true friends.
 
There were more than a dozen of us that first year, though – we now count twenty-four members – and none of us wanted to add that many names to our must-buy-for list.
 
I'm sure there are lots of ways to have fun with a Book Club at the holidays, but we started a tradition that first year that has become our most-looked-forward-to gathering each year: dinner and a holiday book swap in lieu of a December read. I can’t begin to tell you why it’s so fun, but try it and you’ll see:

Everyone brings a book they enjoyed reading (not one we've ever read for the group), wrapped in swanky paper and bows. (Mine is always the pathetic-looking one; I flunked Fancy Wrapping 101!)

We pile the presents in the center of our circle, then draw numbers. No, wait! First, we pour some fancy, not-too-alcoholic drink that usually includes champagne, and we nosh a little. Then we draw numbers (nothing swanky, just numbered scraps of paper thrown into a bowl).

The person who holding #1 gets to choose a present. Feeling and shaking of unopened packages is permitted, and even encouraged. Sadly, different books don’t shake all that differently, so not much is to be learned.

Whoever brought the opened book tells us all a little about it.

The person holding #2 then gets to choose either to open another package or to steal #1's book. If she chooses to steal, #1 opens a second book.

#3 then gets to open or steal, and can steal any of the books that have been opened. If a book is stolen, the poor member left bookless gets to open or steal again – any book except the one just stolen from them or one that has already been stolen 3 times.

Once everyone has an opened book, #1 can put her book in the center and steal any book she wants, even the thrice stolen ones. At which point the stealing goes on until someone wants the book in the center. Which never does seem to happen before our spouses will all have gotten our children safely to bed and asleep.

It's really great fun, and we end up learning about new reading possibilities, even if we didn't get to take them home. And an added bonus: it gets us thinking about what we might read together in the new year.

Happy Holiday Reading! - Meg

When I was a kid, way back in the days before ebooks and ar (augmented reality – duh!), reading meant going to the library.  Our town library was like something they build on a Hollywood back lot: The former one-room schoolhouse, it had varnished pine floors and dusty stacks and rolling ladders and maybe even a pot-bellied stove, though I’m may be making that last detail up.  I remember lying on my belly on the floor between the stacks, lost in Anne of Green Gables or Bed-Knobs and Broomstick or, going with the magic and witches theme, Macbeth.

My parents both read copiously – my dad liked Michener, and Mom favored True Confessions magazine – but we never bought books.  I don’t remember ever going to a bookstore.  I don’t think I was aware that books were something you could buy instead of borrow, that you could have for your very own, and keep forever and ever.

Until the Christmas when, beneath the tree, there was the strangest-shaped package I had ever seen.  It was tall, maybe three or four feet, up to my chest, in any case.  And it was rectangular, but small given its height.  It looked like a wrapped-up chimney, or upended railroad tie.  Most definitely not like a doll, or bicycle, or board game, or anything I had seen under the Christmas tree ever before.

I remember vividly my awe and amazement when I unwrapped the strange package, to find the tallest stack of books I had ever seen.  New books, unread – untouched! – by anyone else, bought for me alone.

Well, not exactly bought, as my parents hastened to tell me.  Actually, these books had fallen off the back of a truck heading across the George Washington Bridge.  Literally.  My dad worked as a cop on the bridge, and flotsam that found its way onto the pavement was divvied up in the station house.  A box of kids’ books?  Hey, didn’t Joe Redmond have a daughter who liked to read?

I don’t think my parents told me this because they wanted to undercut the value of the gift, and it didn’t have that effect.  Rather, I think they wanted me not to feel guilty about them having blown so much money on such an outrageous bounty.  Money was always tight in our house, a fact underscored by the facts that we were allowed only two cookies after meals and Coke only on Saturdays, and I was old enough to be aware how much things cost, and what was worth the money.  And books, which could after all be had for free from the library, obviously weren’t worth the money.

Plus, these books weren’t especially ones I wanted to read.  Some were for boys, some were for younger kids, some were just dumb.

But it was the having that was the thrill.  The crispness of the pages, the unthumbed glossiness of the covers.  Even if I didn’t care much about what the words said, I fell in love with owning those books.

More than in love with: hooked.  I know I’m supposed to support libraries and champion libraries, and I do, in theory.  I know it would make sense for my family budget to use the excellent one in our town rather than trolling the aisles of our two independent bookstores or heading to the nearby Barnes & Noble or clicking on the Amazon link.  But I just don’t want to.

That first thrill of owning a book might be why, even though I buy myself every single book I want, I still ask for books for Christmas. I love the look of that hospital-cornered package, the heft of it, the inevitable surprise on unwrapping, even though you know all along what’s inside.  It might not be the most expensive gift under the tree; it might have even come for free.  But it’s the one I’m going to remember the longest.

I write novels about families, which is another way of saying I sit around and make stuff up, which is great fun and the fact that I do it for a living is a never-ending source of wonder for me.
 
As a mother of young children, I'm also making up new holiday traditions by borrowing from my family, from my husband's family, and then improvising our own.
 
The tradition I cherish most from my family was the candlelight Christmas Eve service at our church. We would file in for the service and pick up small thin candles with a cardboard ring around the base for catching wax. At the end of the service, the choir members would light their candles, then walk down the outside aisles, lighting the end candles. Then you tipped your wick into your neighbor's flame, and so on, the overhead lights gradually dimming. All the while, the congregation would be signing "Silent Night," a cappella. No matter the beauty of any individual voice: together, our song was so beautiful it hurt. By the last verses, only our candles would be lighting us.
 
My kids being little, and bedtimes being what they are, we haven't been to a Christmas Eve service in a while. This year, though, we're going to try. My new church is contemporary, and big, so I doubt there will be candles. In any case, I do look forward to reminding my children that the presents aren't the only reason to look forward to Christmas.
 
From my husband's family we've borrowed the tradition of each person watching each other person open a gift, so every present is admired, discussed and exclaimed over before moving on. This means Christmas morning present unwrapping might approach midday by the end, but so what? It only happens once a year and takes so long to prepare and organize. I'm always about savoring the fun – I'm the kind of person who eats her favorite flavor of Skittles last – so this tradition suits me fine.
 
In my husband's family, each family member also takes a turn playing "Santa", complete with hat, handing out presents from the tree. There's even a list somewhere, so every year we know whose turn it is. It felt like a milestone indeed when I first wore that hat, after marrying into the family. This year at our house, my son – who, in first grade, is learning to read – has gotten dibs on the Santa job. Maybe it's time to start our own list. After all, we even have a hat.
 
My favorite tradition is something new with our generation. When we had our first child, we were living in different cities than each set of parents. This meant, essentially, three Christmases – my side, his side, our own home where Santa would visit. By the time actual Christmas rolled up, we were exhausted from sleeping in other beds and white-knuckle driving on snowy Michigan roads. Plus, we'd already gorged ourselves on two traditional holiday meals with all the trimmings.
 
Myself, I'm no Betty Crocker on the best of days. And if you think about it, if kids could choose a favorite meal, would they pick roast turkey? Glazed ham and mashed potatoes? Nah, they'd go for macaroni and cheese or pizza.
 
The first year of the triple Christmas with a kid in tow, our son had just turned one and was mostly still eating puree or soft food cut into teensy weensy bits. I don't remember what he ate, but my husband and I had fajitas and beer for Christmas dinner. Lately we've done make-your-own mini pizzas, which has been a hit with the kids.
 
It's a perfect ending to the hectic holiday: no linen tablecloth, no pressure to rise to some Martha Stewart standard of perfection (in my kitchen, that would only end in tears, let's be honest). On a day when we might stay in our pajamas 'til noon -- and throw out any rules about what constitutes too much Wii time -- mini pizzas or fajitas are a much better fit than a shiny ham.
 
Happy holidays. Enjoy those Christmas fajitas, everyone.

I don’t know about the Santa who dropped down your chimney when you were a kid, but mine was definitely a cheapskate.

It’s not that Santa did not bring my brothers and sister and me lots of nice toys, but he clearly was looking to save a nickel wherever he could. The most obvious place was in the wrapping-paper department. The other kids in the neighborhood reported their gifts arriving in brand-new, crisp, shiny paper. Ours came wrapped in paper salvaged from holidays past. Not one holiday past but several. Some of it looked like it had come from the first Roosevelt administration. The paper was as soft and supple as well-worn sheepskin, creased and crinkled and mottled by a myriad of old tape tears.

Same story with the bows, which had long ago lost their ability to stick to packages, and many of which had gradually been crushed flat. Santa didn’t care. He’d use them anyway, taping them in place. Year after year, the same paper, bows and ribbons resurfaced like some yuletide magic act.

Another place Santa found savings was in his gift tags. No store-bought cards for our Santa. He was way cleverer than that. Santa would use pinking sheers to artistically cut up the previous year’s holiday cards, repurposing them into fancy little tags on which he would write our names and sign it “From Santa.” Some years, I would find one of Santa’s tags from an earlier year with one of my sibling’s names crossed out and mine written in. Santa recycled everything!
 
The Santa who visited our house each Christmas morning was definitely a penny pincher, but perhaps he was something more – an early eco-warrior with a generous heart matched only by his desire to cut down on the vast amount of resources wasted each holiday after one brief use. With a ho ho ho, he reused, reduced, and recycled his merry little heart out. 

It goes without saying that Santa’s behavior did not strike Mom and Dad as odd at all. They grew up in the Great Depression, my mother one of nine children being raised by a widow, and were famous for their ability to squeeze one more use out of all manner of consumables. Mom dried her teabags on the windowsill for a second brew; dad hung paper towels for repeat wipe-ups and could always find a second use for a bucket of soapy water. My parents saved mayonnaise jars and margarine tubs, and tied stubs
of string together until they had a piece long enough to be of use.

And into this household of full utility came a Santa of like sensibility, following the same frugal protocol. What were the chances of that? Honestly, it seemed a little fishy to me, but being a boy of limited intellectual curiosity, and worrying that if I asked too many questions the whole bloody gifts-down-the-chimney gravy train could come to a screeching halt, I never pursued it.

We kids got into the cheapskate holiday spirit, too. Early on, my sister discovered a trove of long-forgotten wedding presents gathering dust in the attic. Martini glasses, pottery, carving sets, appliances. It was like Macy’s without the price tags. When it came time to shop for Mom and Dad, we enterprising kids simply headed up the attic ladder to pick out whatever struck our fancy. I swear Mom got the same waffle iron six years in a row. No matter, she’d greet each re-gifting with the same fanfare. “Just what I wanted!” she’d exclaim, holding it up. “How did you know?” A few days later, back up in the attic it would go for another year.

Despite his cost-cutting habits, Santa always came through on what mattered: the gifts. Every year beneath our tree, which we cut ourselves from a local farm, would be piles of books and model airplanes and robots and globes and cowboy gear and official NASA space helmets and beginner microscopes. And every year, Santa would always gulp down the snack we left him: a selection of Mom’s homemade butter cookies and a bottle of Coke. (No boring glass of milk at the Grogan house!)

My two brothers, sister and I would come barreling down the stairs at an ungodly hour before dawn. Mom would get up with us, click on the tree lights, and exclaim in amazement: “Kids, look! He came! Santa really came!” She was as crazy about Santa Claus as we were. Then, as we descended on our piles, she couldn’t resist adding: “Now careful not to rip the paper. It still has a lot of good life in it.”

Part of Dad’s Christmas gift was sleeping in, which we all agreed he deserved considering Santa drafted him into late-night elf service in the dreaded “Assembly Required” department. When Dad finally came down to join us, we would open our gifts to each other, careful not to tear the paper – “Ah, a waffle iron!” – and then head off to morning Mass where the highlight was peeking into the manger to see the little plastic baby Jesus with sheep and mules sleeping around him. If we were lucky, there would be snow on the ground. If not, that was okay, too. It was Christmas and we were together, a family warm and happy and imbued with the magic of the season. Upon our return, the house would be filled with our gifts and the wondrous smells of Mom’s roasted turkey. Also with lots of laughter and, mostly, lots of love. Recycled wrapping paper or not, that is where the true meaning lies.

I’m a sucker for schmaltz. On the run up to Christmas every year, I find a movie theatre  playing It’s A Wonderful Life and go see it. This isn’t easy. It’s an old black and white movie, filmed in 1946.  No Brad and Angelina , no vampires. It’s available on DVD , but watching it at home on a small screen doesn’t cut it, so I rely on the fact that other people out there are as sentimental as I am and some smart movie theatre owner understands the value of a great message movie, however old. After a lot of Googling, when I finally discover the rogue It’s A Wonderful Life screening, I’m absurdly relieved.

I know the dialogue by heart, and I admit there are times, usually about half-way through, when I think "Not again… and can we please speed this up," but there is no way I’d miss it.

Jimmy Stewart, who plays the hero, George Bailey, says things like “Hot Dog!” and dances the Charleston. But the story of It’s A Wonderful Life, like A Christmas Carol, is timeless.

All George Bailey wants to do is leave his hometown, Bedford Falls, go travel the world and explore. But a series of moral choices presents itself in such a way that in order to be a good person, to help his family and help the town,  he has to stay and lead a seemingly ordinary, uneventful life.

At the beginning of the movie George is about to throw himself off a bridge. Despite all his sacrifices and good deeds, he is facing bankruptcy and disgrace – because his uncle has foolishly misplaced company money.

Clarence, an angel  sent from heaven to stop George from killing himself, shows him what life in Bedford Falls would have been like if he’d never been born. Without George Bailey, one good human being, Bedford Falls would be a sorry place indeed, and all the people he loves would be sad shadows of themselves.

It’s such a brilliantly simple concept that each time I see it, I wish I’d been the genius who wrote it.

Five years ago, It’s a Wonderful Life saved my psyche. I’d just finished chemotherapy. I was exhausted, bald and depressed. But a tradition is a tradition and I dragged myself off to the movie theatre and watched as Clarence did his angel thing and George Bailey did his good guy thing. I almost fell asleep.  But at the end, when George  realizes he’s been given another chance in life and how much he has to live for; when he runs down the snowy streets of Bedford Falls, shouting “Merry Christmas” with joyful abandon, the message kicked in and I felt my own spirits soar along with his.
 

The power of a great story to transform our lives still amazes me. I walked out of that movie theatre on a high – one which continued. I’d seen such sadness in chemo and radiotherapy rooms. But what It’s a Wonderful Life is telling us is that every single person’s life counts, both in small and big ways. And that we shouldn’t give up, whatever the circumstances we find ourselves in.

There’s one particulary harrowing scene that gets me every time: After a series of sacrifices, George is finally  about to realize his dream and leave Bedford Falls. But his brother, who has just come back from college and is going to take over the family business, arrives home with a surprise wife in tow. At the train station, the new wife tells George that her father has offered his brother a great job in a different town which will make their future secure.

George immediately  understands all the implications of this – if he leaves and makes his brother stay in Bedford Falls, his brother will lose out on his chance of a lifetime. The agony on Jimmy Stewart’s face is wrenchingly intense, and in that one moment, the spirit of what Christmas is all about hangs in the balance.

This isn’t about whether to give an IPhone or a Wii, or how much we should spend on whom, it’s a core human dilemma. 

Do we give, even when that giving goes against our own desire or needs? Wouldn’t any therapist in 2009 tell George he’d done enough, that it was his right to follow his dreams? Even I find myself thinking: “Go for it , George. Forget your brother. Go on, be selfish. Stop this crazy sacrificing.” But George Bailey is always George Bailey and the true spirit of Christmas always prevails. 

For the past four years, I’ve brought my daughter along with me. She loves it just as much as I do, and now she brings her friends too. I have this fantasy that there will always be a movie theatre playing It’s A Wonderful Life at Christmas time, that my daughter will take her  children to it and that they’ll take theirs, and that ninety minutes in a darkened movie theater remembering what Christmas should be about will be a tradition that will continue for generations.

Now, of course, I’m an adult. My stick figures look like indecipherable runes. I’m not very sensible, especially when it comes to eating vegetables. While I can carry a tune, I’ve been trying to learn the ukulele for years, and I’m still not very good at it. But I can, and do, write, just like Jo March. But instead of writing with a fountain pen, eating apples in my garret with rats at my feet, I use my Mac laptop, drinking soy lattes in my office with cats on my lap.

I wonder how many authors would claim Jo March as their first inspiration. How many of us, as little girls, huddled under our covers, thinking, “Yes. That’s what I want.” We wanted to be her, to make those mistakes, and cut off our hair, and yell too loudly, and fall over in the snow. Okay, I was a romantic even then, and I wanted Laurie for myself, and I thought Jo was ridiculous to let him get away, but that was my own private criticism, and I was glad she got her own man in the end. (And oh, when Jo exclaimed, “John Brooke is acting dreadfully and Meg likes it!” what more thrilling words were there? Jo might have been horrified, but we were not. We loved that John had stolen that glove and Meg’s heart.)

I was old enough to crave that romance, but young enough to be desperately clinging to the idea of Santa Claus. I was the eldest of three girls, and I knew that if Santa wasn’t real, then there was no magic at all. And then I’d have to shield my sisters from that ugly truth, and that would be too hard. So at eleven (old enough to know better, perhaps), I still doggedly believed.

And when I unwrapped my present from Santa Claus, a gorgeous, illustrated copy of Little Women with full-color plates, I almost wept with happiness. Here, then, was proof that he existed. He’d answered my request! I turned the book over, and there, on the back, was the green price sticker from Magic Carpet Books, our local bookstore.

My heart plummeted. I felt ill. I peeled the sticker off in private. Maybe Santa just needed help, I told myself. Maybe he’d been really busy. Maybe Santa shopped locally.

It wasn’t until several weeks later that I got the courage to ask my mother outright if there was a Santa Claus, and even until that last moment, I wanted her to lie. Standing in the public library next to the adult periodicals, our voices low so that my sisters over in the kids’ section couldn’t hear us, she said kindly, “What do you think?”

“I think there’s no such thing.” I was bluffing. Come on, Mom. Tell me I’m wrong.

“I think you’re right.”

I nodded and said something like, “That’s what I thought. I won’t tell Christy and Bethany, though.”

It turned out both my sisters knew about the Santa-ruse at a much younger age. They were smarter than I was, and they still are. But that moment in the public library, surrounded by books, was the moment I threw myself into believing in a different kind of magic, instead. I chose to believe in romance. In writing. In making my own dreams come true.

And today love and books and laughter fill my life, and I don’t need a white-bearded guy in a red suit on a sleigh to fulfill my fantasies. I know how to fulfill my own. But I still like to reread Little Women every once in a while, just to remember what it felt like to learn that love comes packaged in the shape of a family, and Marmee always knows best.