Some Splendid Yuletide Reading

Among the many joys of Christmastime is using those precious hours that you find in between ministry and housework and dinner parties and Santa runs and other Yuletide social events to sit by a cozy fire with soft Christmas instrumental music playing in the background and read.  This year has been as busy as ever in all of the above-mentioned ways, yet we have still found time for reading some wonderful stuff. Let me give you a quick review.

Our December selection for the Notting Hill Napoleons was Booth Tarkington’s very funny yet very touching coming-of-age novel, Seventeen.  It was my second time reading the book and I loved it all over again.  So did our book club members and that (besides our gift exchange and enjoyment of delicious desserts) made for a most charming evening.

My two favorite "discoveries" this December were Beasley’s Christmas Party and Christmas Sermons by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Quite different, of course, but both greatly appreciated. The Tarkington book is a heartwarming gem and I highly recommend it to one and all.  And, if you have a Kindle, you can download it for nothing. The other was also obtained through Kindle for a very small price. These Advent sermons of the great German preacher (and heroic martyr to the Nazi's hatred of Christianity) are not easy reading, as you might guess. Nevertheless, they are enlightening, deeply moving, and spiritually challenging.

Next? Well, there are a lot of Christmas-oriented books and short stories that I read almost every December.  Among those that I got round to this year were two Charles Dickens classics -- A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man & The Ghost's Bargain.  I also enjoyed re-reading a collection of 6 of Dicken's shorter stories.  Other cozy re-reads this December were Kenneth Grahame's Wind In the Willows, Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Glocester, and several stories written by Louise May Alcott including “The Abbott’s Ghost” and "A Merry Christmas."

For just $1 I downloaded a Kindle version of Cyril Hare’s An English Murder which turned out to be an enjoyable book from the tail end of England’s “golden age” of mystery reading.

And finally, sitting atop the reading table next to the fireplace and awaiting my spare hours in these last of the 12 Days of Christmas are Joy Born at Bethlehem: 19 Christmas Sermons from the Ministry of Charles Spurgeon, The Clock Strikes Twelve by Patricia Wentworth, Campion at Christmas, and A Christmas Most Foul: A Collection of Holiday Mysteries by a variety of Golden Age authors.

A nice Christmas combination, indeed.