Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Some light marking due to age. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> THE REVEREND CLEMENT MOORE wrote “A Visit from St.Nicholas” (commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas”) in the nineteenth century. So powerfully did that poem’s cold and dark distill a wintertime mood that even twentieth-century Southern Californians ice their suburban houses with fake snow. As a little girl in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve I would lie in my bed hugging to myself a dream of bounty as I listened for the possible skidding of sleigh runners on the roof. Perhaps if I just could stay awake I might be able to hear Santa Claus stuff himself and his burden down our nonexistent chimney. I had no idea of course that my imagination had been caught by a winter hope as old as humankind. No seasonal holidays are more celebrated in the modern Euro- centric world than those that honor the Northern Hemisphere’s return of the light. Even in Australia whose actual winter solstice comes in June rather than December people with European roots make great Christmas feasts in the heat of their summer. But today because of electric lights central heating and supermarkets we have only a dim memory of the time when the return of the light actually heralded the end of a season of deprivation and fear. (LL)