Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Santa visits in many guises.  I often think of good-hearted writers as being very Santa-like, this time of year.  Giving us readers gifts large and small, which resonate all year 'round, and generally bolstering up our sense of goodness.  Here are two such.

On this last day of advent, a bit of Ronald Blythe, from Borderland (Black Dog Books 2005, p.410):

"The thing about snow is that it is not very interesting except at the local level, when it is enthralling."

So very true!  We have a dusting here, just a bit of snow leftover from the weekend, caught in the hummocky dry grass and blue shadows at the edges of the woods.  None on the roads, so traveling tomorrow will be dry and safe for everyone, we hope.  We will be on the move ourselves, with gifts, pie, and more gifts, to two family households.  But before I go, one more book for you, containing a short essay by Robert P. Tristram Coffin, another fine Santa of a man.  Christmas in Maine (Doubleday, Doran 1941).  Our copy is shabby and worn and loved all the more for it.  It holds the ghost of Christmas past - his childhood holiday remembered on a saltwater farm down the coast from here, with parents, aunts, uncles, packs of cousins, glorious food, presents both homemade and boughten, and after everything else, stories told long into the night.


They are so haunting that "...you will hug your knees and hear the wind outside going its rounds among the snowy pines, and you will listen on till the story you are hearing becomes a part of the old winds of the world and the motion of the bright stars."

Keep warm and cozy, with the ones you love, this Christmas.  Talk with you again, on the other side.