Books to fill the season with awe and amazement
Books to fill the season with awe and amazement
M y dad is finally getting his wish this year: We’re cutting our Christmas tree the weekend after Thanksgiving. But my mom still draws the line somewhere, and we won’t decorate it until much closer to Christmas Day. For you see, it’s Advent, and this incredible time of preparation is deeply important to us.
Our advent rituals and traditions have certainly evolved and crystallized over the years, but one definite mainstay has always been books. Since I still have young siblings (though let’s be honest, I use the following system in my own home now), my mom incorporates the 120-plus picture books gathered from various libraries and our own bookshelves into the daily Advent calendar tradition. It works something like this: First, we collect all the Christmas and Advent books. Then, we figure out how many days are in that year’s Advent (27, if you count Christmas Eve, in 2021) and separate the books equally into that many piles. Books for various feast days, such as Tomie dePaola’s Our Lady of Guadalupe, will be added to the pile designated for that particular day. Finally, Mom wraps each pile in brown paper, ties it with twine, and labels it with the correct opening date. Time-intensive? Yes. But undeniably worth it to get excited as old friends are anticipated, unwrapped, and read throughout the whole season. I’d like to introduce you to some of these dear friends and have grouped my selections into four categories.
Picture Books
Good stories paired with beautiful pictures, the following list includes books that make us cry (An Orange for Frankie), wonder (A Small Miracle), and smile (Merry Christmas, Strega Nona).
Robert Barry:
Barbara Berger:
- The Donkey’s Dream
Jan Brett:
Peter Collington:
Tomie dePaola:
- The Clown of God
- Guess Who’s Coming to Santa’s for Dinner?
- Hark! A Christmas Sampler
- Jingle the Christmas Clown
- The Legend of the Poinsettia
- Merry Christmas, Strega Nona
Kate DiCamillo:
Gloria Houston:
The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree
Patricia Polacco:
J. R. R. Tolkien
Susan Wojciechowski:
Family Read-Alouds
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of reading aloud to your children. And older children who pretend they’re uninterested in such stories will often be caught listening in! These are chapter books we’ve discovered over the years, and their timeless charm has us returning to them each December.
Daphne Benedis-Grab
C. L. Davis
Barbara Robinson
Daily Readers
I’ve never been a book-smelling type of reader, except for one tome: our copy of Arnold Ytreeide’s Jotham’s Journey. It’s an indescribable scent, and to me, it means Advent. Ytreeide has three companion books to Jotham (Tabitha’s Travels, Ishtar’s Odyssey, and Bartholomew’s Passage), and each is a story about the birth of Christ told through the eyes of a fictional contemporary child. These are adventurous books, full of engaging characters, suspense, and mystery. They are designed to be read one chapter a day leading up to Christmas, and even though we’ve heard the stories many times before, each chapter ends on such a cliff-hanger, waiting until the next day for the resolution can be a struggle. These are well-written, excellent books and will encourage discussion in families about the season and its meaning.
Feast Days
For Catholics, December is the month of some incredible feast days, and in the Schutte home, we take every opportunity to have a celebration. Here are the most prominent feasts of the month (pre-Christmas) and some reading recommendations to pair with them:
December 6: St. Nicholas
(Yours truly is very attached to this feast day, so attached in fact, that I wrote a piece about it.)
- The Real St. Nicholas, edited and translated by Louise Carus
December 8: Feast of the Immaculate Conception
- Mary, the Mother of Jesus, by Tomie dePaola
December 12: Our Lady of Guadalupe
- Our Lady of Guadalupe, by Tomie dePaola
December 13: St. Lucy
Alas, there aren’t any truly beautiful books specifically about this saint yet. But here are some about St. Lucia’s Day traditions:
- Lucia Morning in Sweden, by Ewa Rydeaker
- Kirsten’s Surprise, book three of American Girl’s Kirsten Larson series
Finally, Michael P. Foley’s Drinking with the Saints and Alexandra Greeley’s Cooking with the Saints are both wonderful food-related resources to further aid your festal celebrations.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, as there are so many other beautiful Christmas and Advent books that also shaped my imagination and understanding of the season growing up. May these stories fill you with awe and amazement, as their authors and illustrators strive to bring home the marvelous wonder that is Christ’s birth into the world.