Although it’s been said many times, many ways…
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY—Merry Christmas to all friends (and enemies, too) of Front Porch Republic! Don’t you worry ’bout that quaffer-scoffer in the Quad Cities. Come December 24 he’ll be reading Clement Moore (or is it Henry Livingston Jr.?) to his fambly and then on the morning after he’ll be up in the predawn watching his kiddies eagerly tear the wrapping paper from that homebrewing kit Santa is bringing.
Two suggested short stories to supplement the usual: Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” a lovely tribute to Miss Sook Faulk and the best thing the troubled Dill ever wrote, and “Christmas Jenny” by Mary Wilkins Freeman, painter par excellence of the stubborn New England eccentric.
Related posts:
- Regionalism in the NY Times While the pickings are generally slim, the NYTimes can sometimes...
- Still. Wichita, KS I write a Christmas post every year....
- “There is No Peace on Earth,” I Said The Prince of Peace—rather a seditious title in our age...
- The Grinch Who Moved Thanksgiving Thanksgiving—or pre-Christmas, as it is known in marketing circles—is upon...
- The Internet Won’t Feed You, and Neither Will We Rod Dreher posts a letter from a young ‘un asking...
Also recommended: Booth Tarkington’s “Beasley’s Christmas Party,” an early work, melodramatic but touching.
Try one of Dickens’ lesser-known “Christmas Books” — ‘The Cricket on the Hearth’ or ‘The Chimes.’
Also the 19th century German writer Adalbert Stifter’s disquieting but lovely novella ‘Rock Crystal,’ about two children who get lost in a snowstorm on Christmas eve.
If Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” be your preference, I recommend less scoffing than quaffing. DT himself obviously preferred the latter.
Leave your response!
From the Porch:
the FPR blogwith 2 Comments
Obama would like a health care plan that is academically approved, but not publicly. Any wonder it still hasn’t passed?
with 11 Comments
News from the provinces is hardly all bad.
with 5 Comments
“In 2000, 56 percent of entering college students backed it. Four years later, freshmen were 57 percent supportive at the time they enrolled, and by graduation, 69 percent of that entering class supported gay marriage.”
So reports The Chronicle of…
with 17 Comments
To fill it out or not. That is the question.
with 4 Comments
With stops in Dallas and Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love should beware – I’ll be there the same evening as Peters, who will be lecturing at Villanova. Riot police are apparently being dispatched as we speak.
with 1 Comment
This term gets used too much. Whenever you are exiled to a curriculum committee run as fast as if you were asked to serve on a tax-cutting committee run by Democrats. Curriculum committees are run by people who were always…
with 22 Comments
with 39 Comments
Derbyshire in the latest TAC:
[H]ere are the Tea Partiers vowing to “take back America.” Is there any real prospect of their doing so? If the “time left for us to do so” was short in 1998, how much shorter…
with 10 Comments
The problem is that public schools inherit children who are “overentertained and distracted.”
with 3 Comments
The concluding installment of “Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic” has appeared on First Principles, a series of essays begun in hopes of analyzing and reforming American conservatism as it exists in our day.
Random Post
Current Hits
Most Commented
all time