Every family has their little holiday traditions. We certainly had plenty—Dad would read A Christmas Carol aloud to us kids, as a result of which I had big chunks of it memorized by the time I was in high school. We all worked together under his direction to make platters of egg rolls to give as gifts—no Chinese restaurant can ever come close to my dad’s egg rolls. My mother made sausage rolls. We usually cut the tree ourselves, often at the last minute. We kids made a stocking for Mom and Dad, and when we woke up before dawn on Christmas, there would be a bulging kneesock by each of our beds, filled with chocolate coins and assorted little items and—always—a tangerine and a quarter in the toe.

According to the note on the flyleaf, this little book made its first appearance in our family on Christmas 1978. My mother undoubtedly found it either at a yard sale or at our favorite store, the St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Shop, which means she probably paid 19 cents for it.

Each of the stories in this book starts out as your standard, heart-warming Christmas story of magic and good deeds, then takes a sharp U-turn at the end, winding up with exploding lightbulbs, adulterous elves, and Rudolph’s flabby laurels. more…

Robertson’s was the big department store in downtown South Bend when I was growing up. It is firmly wedged in my memory, to the point where I still dream about it sometimes. My favorite part was the mezzanine. The book department was on your right as you went up the stairs, and on the left was a luncheonette that served things like club sandwiches, which seemed terribly exotic to me. There was also a bargain basement, with cheap clothes and such, in contrast with the more opulent fare upstairs.

This catalog makes Robertson’s seem much more fancy than it actually was. Certainly the cover line “The store of a million gifts,” was an exaggeration. But I used to linger over each page to deliberate over which item I would choose, given the option. Except the yard of cheese—I got away from that as quickly as possible. Here’s a sample of the delights within.

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Tomás Takes Charge, by Charlene Joy Talbot, was my absolute favorite book when I was a kid. It was my sister’s favorite, too, and my kids loved it when I read it to them. You won’t find it on too many lists of the classics, but for some reason it’s like catnip to my family.

To begin with, it’s the sort of story kids love, about a brother and sister living by their wits in an abandoned apartment in New York City. Don’t we all dream of leaving Mom and Dad and the backyards of suburbia and somehow making it on our own? It’s sort of like an urban version of the Boxcar Children. But it was Talbot’s straightforward writing and her eye for the telling detail that really brought this book to life for me.

In the story, Tomás and Fernanda, ages 10 and 14, are motherless children who are left completely alone when their father doesn’t come home from work. After a few days, a kindly neighbor gets involved and arranges for the children to be taken away by Welfare. To avoid this dreadful fate, Tomás and Fernanda make up a story about going to stay with their godmother in Brooklyn but really they just move to an empty apartment on the boarded-up upper floor of a nearby building. Tomás scavenges for food and other items on the street, while Fernanda, who is agoraphobic and won’t go out, takes care of the place.

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