Advent Books

Every year my family goes to the bookstore and selects a book to add to our Christmas Book collection. This year we all agreed that Two Christmas Mice was the one. We loved the illustrations! My little brother doesn't read yet, but he is really good at telling the story using the pictures. I think your family will enjoy this book as much as mine does!

This is a really cool Christmas book. I love how the pictures make the story come to life. Everyone should read this book about friendship and sharing the Christmas spirit!

My daughter and I came across The Christmas Mice at the bookstore and were attracted by its merry cover. We sat right down and read it together and immediately bought a copy for her and three for my daughters's best friends. We loved how these two snowbound mice find ways to entertain themselves and we were charmed with the way they find each other and become friends. The story is full of imagination and smiles -- a delight.

We got this book for my soon to be two year old son at Christmastime, it's now February and he wants it read to him every night and even sleeps with it! I would highly recommend it, especially to help your young child get used to Santa.

I bought this book as a special treat for potty training and boy, did it work! The story is so very cute and really helps with introducing the different celebrations of Christmas throughout the world. It's nice that there's someone out there finally caring about the quality of books and videos that children are seeing and reading, and the Wiggles are simply the best, in my opinion. Thanks so much Wiggles for providing such educational, fun, and enjoying items!

My own reason why I think that The Wiggles: A Very Wiggly Christms is just like the DVD, Yule Be Wiggling, is because Santa Claus, needed help from The Wiggles. Since one of Santa's reindeer was sick and couldn't pull the slaigh, The Big Red Car was The Wiggles only hope-and delivering presents to children from around the world worked so magically well.
All I have to say now is that today, I've already read this new book. I'll wish The Wiggles my very own Wiggly Christmas to them, in December.

This is a quirky, erudite little book that is sitting on my bedstand right now. Last night I read several entries, from Professor Walsh's haunting account of the Christmas Eve truce among German and British soldiers during World War I, to his witty response to the question "Why is Mistletoe so potent?"
There is clearly a lot of scholarship behind this book, but it is manifested with light grace. I read it with enjoyment, yet in a couple of years, so will my child. It's just a very compact volume, full of surprising and illuminating detail. I'd like to thank the professor for writing it.

This beautifully illustrated Christmas book provides straightforward answers to all kinds of Christmas questions--from the one on the cover (short answer: they were astrologers, something like wise men) to questions and answers about dubious Christmas marketing practices and the latest controversy about who wrote "T'was the Night Before Christmas." Not a religious book or a book for specialists, Were They Wise Men or Kings? dispenses information wittily in a format that encourages browsing as well as cover-to-cover reading. This would make a great Christmas present for someone who deserves more than a card but is difficult to please.

I have never before written a review, but I like this book so much I have abandoned (temporarily) my usual laziness. When I was younger, I loved the Christmas season, but I have grown tired of the emphasis on getting presents, especially for our children. This book reminds me why I used to enjoy Christmas.
The book communicates the Christmas spirit -- the religious and the secular (both of which I love). While I want my children (and me) to think about the meaning of the first Christmas, I also want them to enjoy the spirit of Santa Claus and George Bailey. In bite-sized chapters organized by questions and answers, the author tells the many stories associated with Christmas. To give a few samples, "Why does Santa come down the chimney?" "Have modern astronomers identified the Star of Bethlehem?" "When was Jesus born?" "Was Ebenezer Scrooge based on anyone in particular" "Where did the idea for the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" come from?
In my house, I have seen each of the five of us reading the book -- from the ten-year old who still believes in Santa to the fifty-year old Scrooge. I am grateful to the author for helping to bring the spirit of Christmas into our home.

Wonderful essays about Advent and Christmas.
Mrs. Tickle writes beautifully. In other hands these stories could be overly sentimental, but she puts just the right touch to make them touching without being maudlin.
I re-read it every year to put myself into the real Christmas spirit.

In 1976, Publishers Weekly religion editor Phyllis Tickle and her husband Sam decided to abandon city life and move their family back to their rural roots in western Tennessee. What the Land Already Knows is Tickle's account of winters spent on their farm in the small community of Lucy - "about four thousand citizens if, as we used to say in town meetings, one counted the tractors as well as the cows and people."

This small book is beautifully written, often funny, always touching, and nearly impossible to put down. I devoured it in one sitting, then went back to reread each chapter separately, slowly, savoring the sweetness, the sadness, and Tickle's remarkable insights on family, winter, isolation, and faith.

Following an unhurried path from Advent through the children's return to school in January, Tickle introduces her family - human and animal. Husband Sam is a doctor and passionate grape vine tender. Their seven children, the oldest married before the family moves to the farm, thrive in a world defined by chores, farm animals, and family traditions. Her mother, whose yearly frenzy of pecan cooking the author first tries to escape, then comes to cherish. Silly Sally, Mary, Saint, and Oscar, the cows whose lives, calvings, and deaths bring humor, blessing, and meat to the family's life.

By the time you turn the last of the 114 pages, you feel you might recognize Tickle's family on the streets of Lucy, Tennessee, or any other small farm town.

From her agonizing ambivalence over finding the right gifts for her children to her unabashed pleasure in returning the house to order after the holiday frenzy, Tickle's honesty, always spoken gently, is disarming, beguiling, and sometimes startling.

Perhaps the finest chapter is a reflection on names. Musing on her children's delight in the naming of farm animals, of which there were scores, she notes that the named and the namer create together the identity of each, ending with this beautiful reflection: "What is New Year's Day for the world at large is also the Feast of the Holy name for the church. . . . [B]efore the day is done, I still walk out by myself to Mary's Hill for a little while and think about what it means to know the name of God and to be yourself called by it."

Small enough to fit into a stocking, this is a nearly perfect book for reading and rereading during the long, dark nights of winter.

By the fact of being close to my own age, I am totally impressed by Phyllis Tickle's creativity in picturing Epiphany moments out of her large family in Lucy, Tenn. My one regret is growing-up in East Tenn. I was not privileged to live nearby to Lucy, close to Memphis. While I identify being a member of the little country village of Hall's Cross Roads in East Tenn, it was very nearly the same sort of community that gave all small farmers a closely-knit, feeling of belonging! My sense from Phyllis' neat chapters on "Noel, Holy Mother, The Joseph Candle, Christmas Eve Gift, Silly Sally's Gift, and Name This Child" all create their closely-knit Family in activity reflecting the Christmas Story!

Once I got into the chapter on the "Days of Thomas the Doubter" I noted her carefully portrayed choice of gifts for Laura, "one of the older, newly-wed children...just starting a home." By St Thomas Day, "as my mother used to call it, the Day of the Old Doubter Himself"... She struck a familiar chord in my own sense of describing one of our favorite pastoral characters! In fact, my own point in reading and writing about this unique collection of essays is that it becomes a great model for blending family antidotes into Reflections upon Holy-days and Epi-phanies that people our fondest memories of Christmas.

If I only picture a couple of more impressive spots, they would lie in the chapter, Christmas Eve Gift: "Appalachians conserve everything in order to survive a geography that has no intention of allowing them...or anything else to survive." No pecans are indigenous to Appalachian mountains...just like East Tenn! I was smitten with Ms Tickle's creative pictures of her environment. In particular the family cracking and shelling nuts for nursing stations at Sam's hospital; also the informal relaxed manner of attire when the family sat around the kitchen on the Feast of St Stephen! "We ate and drank and looked for all the world like a Norman Rockwell come to life." Where else could I find a clear reality pictured in beautifully homespun words of real-life?

I am now a Fan of anything written by Phyllis Tickle, regardless if it is "The Graces We Remember or Wisdom In the Waiting!" Let me just soak it up for my writer's hunger and thirst for reality. Retired Chap. Fred W. Hood

My 7 children love this book. We read it from Thanksgiving all the way to CHRISTmas. I haven't researched the book out to know if it is the motive behind the song The Twelve Days of CHRISTmas. But when I read the story it makes so much sense as I have always wondered how they thought up this song. For example,The 5 Golden Rings represents the first 5 books of the Bible and the 9 Ladies Dancing represents the Fruit of the Spirit. The pictures are beautiful and colorful. Children of all ages love the book as demonstrated in my family with children ages 5 months - 13 years. It's definitely a great book to start a family tradition.

Both adults and children enjoy this traditional song while Knorr's beautiful illustrations are worthy of the seasonal favorite. The book appeals to a broader audience by relating the religious meanings behind the song. Don't miss the scenes with the seven swans cavorting in a pool or the luminous angel carrying five golden rings on a cushion.

If you actually counted every idea this book suggests, you'd come up with loads more than 365, not to mention all the ideas of your own it inspires you to come up with! Entertaining, gift suggestions, wrappings, decorating, addresses for mail-order companies, recipes & lots more, all in one book. This is the book I've been wanting for years

I bought this book about 10 years ago, when I was first setting up my own house for Christmas. I read it cover-to-cover as soon as I got it, and have referred to it periodically since then. Many of the ideas aren't my style, but even those get me thinking, and there are plenty of other ideas to use/adapt.

There are no pictures to inspire, but the writing is crisp, the ideas are good, and the text is easy-to-read. The chapters cover:

Getting ready throughout the year
Preparing/buying gifts, wrap, cards, etc. (including food gifts)
Decorating the home/garden
The tree
Entertaining (including recipes)
Traditions

Some of my favorite ideas/recipes are the "Braided Wreath for Birdies" (a bread wreath with birdseed), "Winter Wonderland Centerpiece," and an never-fail party favorite, "Chocolate Indiscretions" (not quite a sin, just an indiscretion). I've considered picking up this newer edition to check for updates and new ideas -- and just because my paperback one is falling apart.

Divided into 3 liturgical sections: 1) Advent, 2) Christmas, 3) Epiphany... this is a really cool book (printed in RED ink!). Fabulous ideas for making your holiday season, as an individual, but most especially as a family, truly something to remember. How to create memories that will last a lifetime. Really.... I don't think I'm gonna sell my copy it's so cool!

This author divides up the Christmas season into it's three distinct parts: Advent, "christmastide," and epiphany, in keeping with the religious significance of Christmas. The focus is on the birth of Jesus and less on the commercially-driven tradition of Santa Claus and the buying frenzy. There are many practical and simple ideas for family and friend celebrations and get-togethers as well as quiet, reflective Christmas traditions. It provides lovely substitutes for all of the frenetic Christmas obligations that seem to permeate the season.

My 6 year old daughter recieved this book for christmas and as a rule, I try to read each book myself, before reading it to her. Well, being the sensitive kind, I cried...twice! Please, don't NOT get this book, thinking that it is too sad. My daughter loved it! And she did not cry, but more importantly she asked questions about Pequele's life. (ie: "What is the plague?", and "Why was that monk mean to Pequele?", "Is Pequele an angel now?". This opened doors for me, on subjects that every child eventually arrives at. I feel that this book touches more than the heart. It tells a child that he/she can endure through even the hardest of times. It shows them that, even though there is death, there is learning. I also felt that it was more spiritual than it was religious. To me, this is very important, in showing the world to my very observant 6 year old. Trully deep.

I read The Acrobat and The Angel to my 3 year old daughter last night. It moved me to take action. 1)I am sending the book today to my best friend in Texas who has just lost a close family member. I hope it will help heal her heart. 2) I am getting my own copy of the book (we had gotten it from our library). and 3) I am going to tell lots of folks about the book. The Shannon brothers are wonderful. Both the story and the illustrations are touching. I dug in to all the illustrations to see the symbols used in the frames for each page - very telling! I also noted the two pages without frames and thought about what David Shannon was saying, putting his drawings there without "limits". Get it! Read it! Give it!

This book, Advent Anticipation: Drawing Nearer to the Christ-Child, was a great help for our family. It allowed all of us (of differing denominational backgrounds such as Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican & Baptist) to all draw together during the Christmas season. There was nothing denominationally to offend any of us, yet it brought us together spiritually at a time when this was expecially yearned for and needed. Some of us actually reread the book after Christmas. We didn't want to stop. It has many insights not readily available elsewhere.

 

 

 

Regardless of a person's denominational preferance (or lack thereof), if you'll just slow down long enough to spend a few moments daily within these pages, you'll be blessed. Ms. Conte's methods of providing daily devotionals that are biblically sound yet personally applicable allows for the quiet reflection time we all need, especially during this busiest of seasons. Here's what Pastor Peter Kelsall of the United Kingdom said about the book: "In season, the scriptures and meditations will warm your heart, broaden your thinking and help you keep the true meaning of Advent and Christmas in perspective. Out of season, there are depths here into which you can dip and be refreshed in your daily journey with God."

These conversations can work in almost any setting. The simple conversation style helps highlight the meaning of advent in today's world...and it's great having one resource that covers all three years of the lectionary cycle.

This book comes in extremely handy for a busy Advent season. The dialogues are easy conversations between friends and relates the day's scripture lesson to today's life. It brings a different perspective and understanding to the lighting of the Advent wreath.