Christmas Paper Weight

I confess:  I'm a big-time lover of Christmas.  I love everything about it.  The lights, the trees, the food, the music.  And I love to read just about everything about this wonderful holiday season.

I have another confession:  I cannot part with old Christmastime magazines.  I have Christmas issues of Country Living and Country Home (this one is from December 1999) that go back to the 1980s, and every year I haul them out and reread them (or at least look at the pictures).

I have issues of old (English) Country Living magazine from years gone by that my mother gave to me.  Old December issues of Better Homes and Gardens, Cottage Living, Martha Stewart Living, Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion and much, much more.  I remember the articles and still manage to enjoy them.  (I like and always reread one in the December 2000 issue of ME's Home Companion called "Have A Merry Mitzvah" (by Rachel Kornblum) about how Jewish people do good deeds at Christmastime like take their Christian colleague's shifts in hospitals, go caroling in Nursing Homes, etc.  It includes pictures of the two cutest little girls--who are probably in college by now.

Then there are all my favorite Christmas "annuals."  Christmas with Victoria.  Christmas with Southern Living.  Country Woman Christmas.

Last week I mentioned a few of the books I love to reread at Christmastime.  I have a bunch of Christmas children's books.  Naturally, The Polar Express; but then I have some that you've probably never heard.  "Emma's Christmas Wish" by Sallyann J. Murphy (and illustrated by Cary Phillips), Christmas Tree Sam by Helen D. Olds (copyright 1952--before I was even born; got it at a garage sale for a quarter); A Pussycat's Christmas by Margaret Wise Brown (illustrated by Anne Mortimer); The Christmas Robin (an English "Ladybird" book), adapted by David Hately from the Wise Robin by Noel Barr; and the extremely tacky (photographic) Merry Christmas America:  A Front Yard View of the Holidays.

At some time during the holiday season I will listen to Patrick Stewart read (an abridged version of) Dickens' A Christmas Carol (and look at the wonderful illustrated version of the book by Italian artist Roberto Innocenti.

Come the day after Christmas I'll put all these books and magazines away until next year.  But they'll be waiting for me to take out and enjoy again, and again, and again . . . .

Do like to read holiday books and magazines?