What's In My Teapot?

For this book review, I enlisted the help of one of my in-house experts: my soon-to-turn-eight-years-old daughter! It wasn't a difficult assignment: I just asked Elasa which Christmas book, from the small stack I lugged home from the library, she liked best, and without hesitation she brought me this one: The Christmas Tugboat , by George Matteson and Adele Ursone and with paintings by James E. Ransome. I had my own hesitations since the story is about how a tugboat helps to bring the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree to New York City, and we don't even do Christmas trees, but the story is so appealing from several other aspects that I thought it was worthy of mention! For starters, Christmas aside, this is a really fascinating book about tugboats and a lot can be learned from the viewpoint of the narrator, who is a child! Secondly, it is a really neat family story, since the girl's father is a New York Harbor tugboat captain, and he takes his wife and daughter...

Our family started the tradition of celebrating Advent last year (read more about it in this post ) and since it was a highlight for us, there was little question about us doing it again this year!  Even though I don't regret starting this tradition, it did remind me that one should always be careful what one starts, for children are good at holding you to it and often remember nitty, gritty details and want to do them, too! Last year we decorated our little paper milk cartons on the day before Thanksgiving, and that was one thing in particular that the children remembered and thought we should repeat, and so we did! The only difference was that last year Wesley was at a meeting and this year he was home- albeit peeling 10 pounds of potatoes for the next day's festivities- so I think I liked this year's version better!!! It takes a surprising amount of time to decorate 24 cardboard boxes, but the children stuck with it to the end and kept their creative juices...

Am I the only one wondering exactly how we arrived at December with such unprecedented speed? It really does not seem like a whole year ago that we celebrated Advent, had an anniversary, watched Elasa blow out her birthday candles...and here we are: doing it over again after what feels like a span of about seven months! If time really does speed up the older you get, there may well come a time when the decorations will just stay up year round because the year will only be about a month long, anyway! I had some trouble (again!) coming up with a book of the month for December! I had vague ideas of what I wanted, but nothing turned up in all my searching that quite matched what was in my head. I guess it rarely does, so I should not have been surprised. What I did find in my searching was a disturbing number of cowboy and Amish romance novels with Christmas themes. All I want for Christmas Is a Cowboy was one such title, so you can see why I was having some trouble! The book...