I also got some Santa Stamps.
While I was there, I did a little more local shopping and saw some local scooping. Yes, Mike Mulligan was there with Mary Anne the steam shovel, digging up more of beautiful Uptown Normal. But "three-bank corner" is pretty well in place, and, as I recall, another hole is soon to be filled with something. Meanwhile, the trees are lit on the traffic circle, and the town has a holiday feel!
I also did some local scoping at the fabulous Garlic Press, a kitchenware, food, and gift shop with wonderful gadgets and pretties and yummies. Yes, I bought some things that, of course, I cannot announce here. But I also 1) put ideas in my own head and 2) got excited about the after-Christmas sales (where I got some of this year's stocking stuffers last year!) Which..uh oh...
Yep, I came home and found them in the closet! Because, you know, some years I don't...until Christmas Future...becomes Christmas Past...or vice versa. Ack! Head stuck in a time loop!
Tonight's full moon and penumbral eclipse beckon and have me a bit moody. Oh, that's right. That's me all the time. Moody me.
Yes, it's a children's book, like the others you see here, favorites from childhood. And, yes, we are reading it, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson, for the December meeting of my book group, because we wanted something short that wouldn't get in the way of our eating.
Wait. Didn't I say something about the moon?
I hadn't thought about Mike Mulligan for awhile: oh, I did love that book as a child, and read to it my children as well. I have been thinking about my favorite picture books recently, because there were two childhood books I adored so much that I carried them with me through college, and, of course, was excited to share them with my kids. And these two books, in hindsight, are quite strange. They don't show up on any lists, I'm sure they're out of print, and you never see them, even in libraries. One was "Loudmouse" by Richard Wilbur. It's a fun read-aloud because it follows a family of mice that live in the walls of a house. One mouse in the family can't manage to speak quietly, so the reader has many chances to suddenly shout out the lines, which makes the kids jump and giggle. The other was "An Anteater Named Arthur" by Bernard Waber. It is a smiple, episodic book: stories his mother tells about their picky eating, house cleaning, boredom, forgetfulness. They aren't spectacular books, but for some reason hidden in my own childhood, they became powerful totems of a sort.
ReplyDeleteWhat did my now-grown children think of them? They have their own favorites. And what makes a seemingly random book become precious? I wonder....
I vaguely remember the anteater book, but I spent countless hours reading Waber's "Lyle the Crocodile" books to my kids. "Mike Mulligan" is one of my all-time favorites, along with Margaret Wise Brown's "Pussywillow". My heart was warmed when my oldest bought "Ferdinand" for his son. I sometimes wish I was still small enough to crawl behind the Christmas tree to read a book...
ReplyDeleteLiz and Collagemama, thanks for sharing your memories and sparking more of mine. Oh, and I loved to sit behind the shining tree to read!!
ReplyDeleteHahahha....I have SO done the gifting forgetting/rediscovering trick :). Usually, it's when I put something away in a special place ("SO I WILL REMEMBER IT!") that I inevitably forget about it :).
ReplyDeleteHannah, I also found a rather BIG forgotten thing in the closet. That I had forgotten, day after day, opening the closet door....
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