Christmas Treasury [Hardcover]

I'd had this anthology a number of years and ran across it as I was preparing for the holidays, and once I began leafing through it, I couldn't put it down. It is filled with classics (Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas) as well as others you may never have heard of. Primarily prose, there are also poems by ee cummings and Robert Frost. Selections are ordered alphabetically by author so you get a wonderful juxtaposition of material as you page through works by Arthur C. Clarke, Dylan Thomas and many many others. You will love this anthology, especially if you or your family are looking for something to read during the holidays.

I was looking for a keepsake style Christmas Treasury that could be read to children. That is not this book. It has several great classic authors and stories but it's paperback and the print is small. There are no pictures and it's really more of an adult style Christmas Treasury for personal reading. I was going to give it to my niece but my mom liked it so I gave it to her and bought my niece a different one.

This is a guy I would really like to know (or have known, if it's too late), because he reminded me that the best prose is nonfiction and our greatest holiday--holy or secular--is Christmas.

The year begins and ends at Christmas (New Year's Day is just a formality). In my psyche the year wraps around like a racecourse, with Christmas at the upper left of a horizontal oval. Off to the right are the ill-defined months of spring an early summer, but when one begins the ascent of October, November December you begin to gauge what the old year has meant and what its culmination on Christmas Day will bring. Newcombe sees the fullness and centrality of this meaning of Christmas, and presents the holiday and its season through many lenses.

My favorite so far (for I've read about as much in this thrift-store treasure as Melville had read when he wrote "Hawthorne and his Mosses) is George Plimpton's piece on the Christmas Bird Count. Both Plimpton and the CBC are part of my regional consciousness, and I am reminded of redpolls waving on stalks of grass in northern Vermont and skittering across the barrier beach in Rhode Island. Thermoses of by-then tepid vegetable beef soup. What is Christmas without memory--more than eighteen hundred years of them according to one well-known ghost?

Newcombe's anthology is a memory machine, as all great literature is, doubling memories of literary encounters with our construction of experience. Thanks, Jack. Stop by over Christmas, even if you can come only in spirit.