Mother Makes Christmas

It's so hard not to become obsessed about collecting vintage children's books.  When I find an illustrator we love, I just want to track down everything I can!  Finding books at flea markets, thrift stores, and used bookshops makes it easy since you can pay less than $1 and justify bringing home a box-load.

Here's a vintage illustrator that I've lately been drawn to.  We have a few of her books floating around, one of poems and nursery rhymes and another is a chapter book called Indian Captive.

 Mother Makes Christmas

Cornelia Meigs

pictures by Lois Lenski 1940

 This one is a Christmas story about a little girl Sally and her family in Vermont.  It's been a tough year, but her mother has decided to "make Christmas" which means all the family will gather at their house for dinner.  When certain plans fall through, Sally and her brother, with the help of their vising cousin, work hard around the farm.  Their guinea hens are traded for two big turkeys and there's a bit of dangerous excitement on Christmas Day.

Just because it was a dull gray afternoon, with low skies and a soft chill in the air, Sally Gilbertson had let the school bus rumble away and had chosen to walk home.  Now it was not so very far from Christmas and still the first snow to come.  It would begin this very afternoon, Sally felt sure, for people who live on Vermont farms are always weather-wise.

And look at these great end pages!

A Child's Christmas Cookbook

 A Child's Christmas Cookbook

Betty Chancellor 1964

My friend Lauren gave me this wonderful book for Christmas a couple years ago.  It's filled with Victorian illustrations and all sorts of fun recipes and ideas.  The recipes are fairly easy- we've made cinnamon toast and the egg on bread.  I especially loved the pages about Afternoon Tea or the Party in the Playroom with Tin Soldier Tarts.  And my favorite- Breakfast for a Tired Mother.

Visions of Christmas

This is a really neat Christmas book.  Various Renaissance artists are represented in beautiful triptych paintings that fold open on the pages.  Each artwork corresponds with verses from scripture showing the annunciation, the visitation, the nativity, adoration of the shepherds, the epiphany, and the flight to Egypt.

Visions of Christmas 

A Renaissance Nativity

Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers 1997

The first page describes what a triptych is:  an image in three parts.   Folding triptychs, where two hinged wings flank a central panel, were a very popular form of devotional painting in the fifteenth century.  The more important interiors of the triptych could be protected by closing the wings; the exteriors, which were usually exposed to dirt and burning candles, were painted less colorfully or in monochrome to suggest stone sculpture and finished with simple ungilded frames.  Some "visions" in this book reunite the wings and panels of divided triptychs, allowing the viewer for the first time in many years the experience of unfolding the wings to reveal the contrasting glories within.

(Charlotte likes it because it's like a flap book.)

The index of paintings in the back gives biographical information about the artists and their work.

Letters of Thanks

Letters of Thanks

Manghanita Kempadoo

illustrated by Helen Oxenbury 1986

A different take on the 12 Days of Christmas.  Written in letter form, the recipient, Katherine Huntington, thanks Lord Gilbert for his gifts.  But as the days go on, and the presents get out of hand, the thank you's get shorter and sharper.  We thought the ending was very funny!

Christmas ABC

 Christmas ABC

The British Museum Press 2002

Found at the thrift store, this nice little book has an ABC poem (adapted from  Carolyn Wells) and fantastic vintage illustrations reproduced from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The fine print on the back page says:  The illustrations reproduced in this book are from color lithographic postcards designed by artists at the Wiener Werkstatte, in Vienna, Austria, between late 1907 and 1914.

Enjoy!

Christmas in a Barn

Charlotte is singing "Away in a Manger" at our church's Christmas program this year.  She's very excited that she gets to dress as a sheep.  Along with practicing her song, we've been reading this sweet book.  It's illustrated by one of our favorites, Barbara Cooney, and tells the story of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus born in the stable with all the animals around.

Christmas in the Barn 

Margaret Wise Brown

Pictures by Barbara Cooney 1952

Rain rain rain

Those who live around here will know what I mean.