Sunday 22 December 2019

Christmas Days ('Tis the season to be reading)

'Tis the season to be reading. I thought I would give another reading suggestion for Christmas, one of the happy discovery I made last year: Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson (a fitting author's name for Yuletide stories if there ever is one). It is twelve short stories and twelve Christmas recipes (!), one for each of the twelve days of Christmas. It is a rich and dense book that truly encompass the season's aspects. Winterson give us mostly ghost stories or stories with an element of supernatural, not very scary ones, but all very touching. You also have some very heart warming tales, one about mistreated pupils in an orphanage run by a tyrannical matron, who are saved by magical frogs, another about a dog, a retelling of the legend of Mistletoe Bough and Winterson's own take on the Nativity Story, told by the donkey who carried the Holy Family to Betlehem ("The Lion, the Unicorn and Me", which is one of my favourite). The recipes are stories unto themselves, as each one is associated with a Christmastime memory of the author, not always a happy one. Christmas Days is one of the best discoveries I made last year.

1 comment:

Debra She Who Seeks said...

I've only ever read Jeanette Winterson's first book, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" but I enjoyed it as a fairly standard coming out story. I'm not quite sure why it was the literary sensation it was -- timing, I suppose. This book sounds intriguing and I will check it out!