Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told for Children
Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told for Children
Five luminous stories told from a father's lap to his children's waiting ears. William Dean Howells, the great realist who shaped American letters, here reveals another dimension: a tender humorist who understood that the best children's fiction lives in the space between nonsense and wisdom. The centerpiece, "Christmas Every Day," follows a little girl who wishes Christmas could come every single day. She gets her wish. What follows is delicious chaos: endless turkey, mountains of presents that keep arriving, and a nation slowly driving itself mad with perpetual festivity. Howells was too sophisticated not to know that childhood's deepest wishes contain their own warnings. The other stories sparkle with equal grace: a pony engine that thinks it's a person, small adventures in daily life that feel enormous to young hearts. This is literature meant to be read aloud, passed hand to hand, held open on a parent's knee. It captures something many modern books forget: that children deserve not just action but texture, not just plots but rhythm, not just stories but the ritual of being told stories.
X-Ray
