And now it really is Christmas

It's 5 am, and I'm the only one awake in the house. I'm happy because--well, because it's Christmas and everyone's here and there's a nice big Moravian sugar cake waiting for us for breakfast--but also because after saying, "every day is Christmas," well, now it really is Christmas.

But for me Christmas is probably not what it is for others. Coming from what I like to call a "non-sectarian" spiritual perspective (that's what I always tell my daughter to say when people ask about our religion: "we're non-sectarian!"), Christmas has always been incredibly important, but more as a part of connecting ourselves to tradition and history than anything else. That's when we think about family, and it's when we get together and indulge in the most traditional kind of feast day--I really am talking about a feast day in the old medieval sense--where it was all about community. That's what I think about when I think about Christmas.

My favorite description of Christmas is from Gawain and the Green Knight, where there is a night of feasting, games, and laughter--before, of course, the Green Knight comes in and starts going on about how fun it would be to have a beheading game and all that. (You have to admit that's kind of a downer! I love to point the misplaced oddity of the request out to my students, because the tone of the poem is still so understatedly fun and strange there that it's easy to miss.) But anyway, the description of the feast night is very nice--the way I imagine medieval feast nights ought to be.

When I was a little girl I read a series--now long out of print--called The Maida Books, by Inez Haynes Irwin. My mom had had the first one, Maida's Little Shop, when she was a little girl. The copy she gave me when I was about eight had been hers, and it dated to the 40s--and so do all the copies you can find these days. I've been on a life-long quest to acquire the series; I only have about half of them, and all of them are yellowed and falling apart. Maida's Little Shop was my favorite, though. It's about a little girl who is dying, although you're not sure why. She has been crippled from disease; her mother has died, but her father is very wealthy and is completely devoted to trying to get her to commit to life again. Indeed, you get the sense in the first part of the book that she has simply lost her will to live....until he takes her on a driving trip to a little town in Massachusetts, and she sees a little shop beneath a tiny house, and remarks with the first flare of interest her father has seen in a long time that she would like to keep a shop like that.

So he buys it for her. I said he was wealthy! There is much of the fairy-tale element here: instead of a godmother she's simply got a rich dad. And in true fairy-tale form, her father imposes certain tasks, which she must satisfy in order to complete her own personal quest: Maida must stock the shop, run it herself, and make it profitable. Its success or failure is entirely up to her.

And she does it. She makes it into a candy and toy shop for children. She meets a group of wonderful friends--all of whom, as it turns out, have also had their own periods of ill health, poverty, unhappiness, or even abuse--she has adventures, they tell each other stories. And by the end of the novel, of course, she has lost any vestiges of her illness--including her limp, a remainder from her years spent as a cripple post-surgery--and she has become indistinguishable from other happy, active little girls.

This book, too, ends with a marvelous Christmas scene in which Maida's best new friend--a child displaced by the troubles in Ireland--is reunited at last with his lost mother, who until that point had not been able to get out and who had been essentially cut off and lost from the rest of the family. Maida's father finds her and returns her to the family.

I've thought often that this book had the potential to become a true children's classic. And the rest of the series--what I've been able to read of it--is pretty good, too.