As a child I always asked for books at Christmas time. For some reason they rarely materialized. One year I was given two beautiful hardback books with colored plates: Little Women and Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. Both are proud members of my book collection to this day.

My own children have a whole basket of holiday reading, from the mundane to the transcendent. This week I’m offering three charming tales sure to be Christmas classic. (Next week: beautifully illustrated nativity tales.)

Little Tree
e.e. cummings
Deborah Kogan Ray, illustrator

“little tree, little silent Christmas tree you are so little, you are more like a flower…”

My husband is a fan of e.e. cummings, and I gave him this beautiful watercolor of a book one Christmas when we were dating. Now we read the gentle story of Little Treeto our own children on quite nights beside our Christmas tree. It’s out of print now, but you can still find a few gently used copies here. Today’s Flavor: Rhythmic and lovely.

The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree

Gloria Houston, author

Barbara Cooney, illustrator

An Appalachian mother and daugther are determiend to retireve the mountain top Christmas tree Papa had earmarked before he left for the war. The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree is a simple, lovely tale about making do and making merry where a wedding dress becomes angel garb, and a clever mother finds a way to make her daughter’s Christmas wish come true. Well researched to capture the reality of Appalachian life and beautifully illustrated by Barbara Cooney, this can quickly become a Christmas classic in your home. Today’s Flavor: Nostalgic and hopeful.

P.s. Ms. Houston also wrote the fantastic My Great-Aunt Arizona and Ms. Cooney illustrated the wonderful Miss Rumphius.

Red Ranger Came Calling
Berkeley Breathed

Ohmylord, there cannot possibly be a more hilarious and charming tale than Red Ranger Came Calling, the story of a sour little boy and a disinhearted old …Saunder Clos? Berkely Breathed famed creator of Bloom County, Outland, and Opus, travels back to his childhood haunts on Vashon Island to illustrate a cheeky tale that’s sure to delight. Santa is down in the dumps and “visitors not recieved with zesty jolliness at the moment.” But by-gum, the Red Ranger of Mars is going up to his house to find out what happened to his “Official Buck Tweed Two-Speed Crime-Stopper Star-Hoper Bicycle.” What he finds there…well, I don’t want to give it all away. Suffice it to say that this comically illustrated book is a sure fire hit in our high-drama household. Today’s Flavor: Firey and fun.

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I know it’s cutting it close, but on this day before Thanksgiving, I’d like to review some books for the diners who are sitting at the kids table.

The first is The Night Before Thanksgiving“>. Like the characters in this book, my children and their cousins giggle about the same things I snickered over with my cousins — goofing off at the kid’s table, putting olives on our fingers, and eating leftover turkey sandwiches. Nostalgic and fun.

The second is a more artful story The Very First Thanksgiving Day, which touches on the fact that we Western Europeans owe our very survival on this continent to the Native Americans who shared their skills and bounty with our ancestors so many years ago. Beautiful illustrations and a repetitive rhythm children love. Artful and insightful.

My eight year old daughter fell in love with this book, which she read to her two year old cousin last week. It’s not about our Fall holiday, but it does a lovely job of encouraging gratitude. Give Me Grace is short enough to memorize in a couple of readings, and the alluring illustrations feed the eye as well as the soul. Bright and meaningful.

Finally, I’d like to recommend this pretty, classic story. Ox-Cart Man is not directly about Thanksgiving, but it’s cyclical story of growing-and-harvesting captures the turning of the seasons, while it’s spare bounty quietly instills a since of gratitude amongst our overly-modern children. Classic and grateful.

Click on the links in this post to order these items, or any items at Magpie Suggests, and your purchases will help fund this site. Thank you for your support!

After a certain age, you just aren’t musically hip anymore, you know? I’m still trucking out my Indigo Girl’s CD’s and Paul has an embarrassing penchant for all things George Michael. When the clothing of your New Wave youth show up in 80’s vintage shops and as Target knock off’s (leggings anyone) you know you’ve crested over the hill.

Still, I need new tunes. So I did something my teenaged self would never sink to — I Googled all the TV shows I like that have good music. And what do you know? I found some good stuff. Here’s my recs for this week:

Ingrid Michaelson (Grey’s Anatomy and theOld Navy.)
Her solemnly perky little tune (The Way I Am) about giving her love her sweater is just so …catchy. You can’t download it on the subscription service from Zune, but maybe you can download it from ITunes or pick it up here.

Iron and Wine (Grey’s Anatomy)
Okay, I am SO in love. This is a songwriter dream – beautiful lyric and moody tunes for the grey season. My favorite line from “Love and Some Verses” is “Love is a skirt you made long to cover your knees. ” I’m not sure I know what that means, but I’m pretty sure I need to carry it around on a little scrap of paper in my wallet. Find your favorite lyric Our Endless Numbered Days“>here.

Will Dailey (CSI: New York) Why is Gary Sinise suddenly playing the bass in a NYC club? Who knows, and as long as he’s on stage with Will Dailey’s gritty, folksy voice, who cares? The single Rise (which also appears on Back Flipping Forward) is well worth the purchase.

Feist (Ipod commercial) 1,2,3,4…how many times have you seen the new IPOD ad? Not enough to find out who the quirky little gal is dancing on the new screen. Welcome to Feist and the 1234 single off “The Reminder”. Maybe she and Ingrid could do a little duet together? Buy “The Reminder” here.

What tunes are catching your ear lately?

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The Crafty Chica Collection: Beautiful Ideas for Crafts, Home Decorations and Shrines from the Queen of Latina Style
Kathy Cano Murilla

This week’s suggestion is the ever-useable The Crafty Chica Collection. This is a fun and fabulous ode to all things red, yellow, and glittery. I met Kathy at BlogHer 07, where she was on the arts and crafts panel. Her effervesant personality lit up the room as she encouraged us to go beyond the pink-and-chocolate-brown color combo trend and play with the colors of Latin heat. The general feel behind everything that Kathy creates is “have fun” and “use what you love.”

In the The Crafty Chica Collection, I especially like her idea for outdoor candle lanterns using tins from imported stewed tomatoes and Guatamala wedding beads. (I wear the set I found at a garage sale with some outfit almost every week – I’d have to hunt up more to make patio lights!) The crafty Chica Collection, or Kathy’s new book Crafty Chica’s Art de la Soul will give you lots of visual ideas for our next Creativity Challenge – matchbox shrines! You can find lots of free project ideas at Kathy’s super helpful website.

Hmm….I think I need to go buy the Mexican Folk Art Coloring Book and some glitter….

The War of Art
Steven Pressfield

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
-p. 39

Living the artist life is hard. No one gives you a business card and a plaque on the door to help you feel official. There’s not a regularly salary. It comes with no overtime pay.

While we artists may turn up our noses at bourgeois needs like a pay raise and a corner office, the reality is that in our culture these things convey value. They tell us and others that we are legitimate–that we have a license to practice art, that someone has given us permission. In short, cash and clout confirm that we have cajones.

Without these cultural permission givers, artists often find themselves adrift and never progress professionally. Steven Pressfield would like us all to please, knock it off.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles takes the rose colored lenses off our romantic notion of what it means to be a writer/painter/poet/etc and gets us all prepped for battle. What are we fighting? Resistance, mostly –our most prevalent foe. In this pithy book, Pressfield teaches us how to move beyond being amateurs. More than any other book, The War of Art taught me to become a professional artist.

Go ahead, get your marching orders.

Loudon Wainwright III
Strange Weirdos: Music from and Inspired by the Film Knocked Up

Paul and I are one of those couples who stay in the movie theatre until all the credits have run. We got into this habit because the kids always think there is going to be some funny little extra at the end of the latest feature length cartoon if you just wait long enough. (Remember when Ferris Bueller would tell you all to go home if you hung around long enough after the movie?) But even when the kids aren’t with us we hang around so we can find out who performed what songs in the movie. It’s a great way to find new music to love.

This madness of this method lead us to discover a beautiful song at the end of Knocked Up (a sleeper hit of a movie– but that’s for another review). The tune that plays over the credit is Daughter from Loudon Wainwright’sStrange Wierdos. I instantly fell in love with this sweet tune, which seemed to be written just for my daughter Eden. I snagged the whole album and was presently surprised to find that I liked most of the songs on the rest of the album CD well. Grey is LA captures the zietgiest of the area perfectly; X or Y is a funny take on the random nature of babymaking; the honkytonk vibe of Feel so Good will get your toes tapping, and Valley Morning is just…nice. All the tunes have that nice storytelling aspect that can only come from a practiced singer-songwriter — are rare gift in this radio pop world. Check ‘em out and let me know what you think.

Today’s Flavor: Folk pop meets the honkytonk blues

Wreck This Journal
Keri Smith

I’ve been a big fan of Keri Smith’s illustrations-and-ideas ever since my beloved Jen sent me home from Maryland with a copy of Living Out Loud: Activities to Fuel a Creative Life. In this first sprial-bound tome I learned how to make Keri’s “magic book,” which was the basis of my free love give away project last February.

Now I’m head over heals in love with one of Keri’s latest magic tricks, Wreck This Journal — a book designed to bust you right out of the strangling perfectionism that keeps you from living creatively. Each page urges you to mess it up…rip it to shreds, punch it full of holes, cover it with staples, and so on. While some people are making art of this destruction, others are gleefully playing along and just making a mess. Yesterday I burned a page inside the house, only to find my whole kitchen was magically dusted with grey ash “snow.”

Cate, my seven year old, loves this book as much as I do and has gleefully spilled drinks on it, smashed it full of blackberries, and thrown it into the sea. Keri even has a flickr pool set up for you to show off your handy work. Go ahead, give it a try! I trip dog dare you!

Anyone who posts a page of their wrecked journal in Keri’s pool in the next month, and drops me a note in the comments below will be in a drawing to win a copy of Living Out Loud.

P.s. Congratulations to last week’s winner Melissa (from a drawing of two!), who gets my copy of Water for Elephants.

Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen

When I finished all the books I’d brought on vacation, I wandered into Cloud and Leaf (Manzanita, Oregon) to find a new read. A long day on the beach and one late night reading-fest later, I’d already finished the whimsical, romantic Water for Elephants.

I’m an unabashed fan of all things circus-y : Circus Contraption, Cirque de Flambé, and the Aerialistas being three of our favorite local haunts. But after the second season of Carnivale turned out to be a disappointingly creepy follow up to its fabulous first season beginnings, I’ve been left high and dry for stories of redemption and belonging among the freaks and roustabouts. The historically-backed folklore of Sara Gruen’s third novel was just the thing to feed my jones for dust bowl era tales of traveling with The Show.

Water for Elephants features Jacob, an ivy-league trained vet who starts riding the rails after a personal tragedy and ends up living the life fantastic with Benzinzi Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Brutal, psychotic managers take Jacob into their motley crew where he finds himself embroiled in a tale of wonder, mystery, murder and romance. A quick but yummy read, this 300+ page novel reads like a short story. Some reviewers have found the twist-ending a bit too neat given the dire realities of the setting, but I say there’s nothing wrong with a bit of a potboiler ending and a little romance when you are reading in the dog days of summer. You’ll be glad to have read this in paperback or from the libary, and eager to pass it on to a friend. In fact, I’ll pass my copy on to one lucky reader who submits their favorite summer read in the comments below. (I’ll draw a name next Wednesday.) Happy Reading!

Hear an NPR review of this book here.

The Devil in the White City
Erik Larson

Paul and I could hardly put down this page turner of a book, eventually buying it in paperback so we could stop fighting over whose turn it was to read the library’s copy. In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson uses his journalism chops to research the story of America’s first documented serial killer, and the simultaneous construction of the world’s fair that brought him such a large choice of prey. This unappealing topic is shaped into a tastefully written true crime story that is cunningly juxtaposed with the tale of massive cultural change during the building of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair. The fair, nicknamed “The White City” for its opulent architectural center piece, has since been lost to the great Chicago fire, but Larson manages to bring it back to life only to have it steal the show from the gorier biography of Dr. H. H. Holmes, sociopath M.D. Sensitive readers can easily skim over the relatively few graphic details and sink into the fascinating tale of determination which brought the Chicago Exposition to life.

Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports
James Patterson

It’s the near distant future and the fate of humanity is in the hands of ….a bunch of kids with wings???? In this fast-paced ‘tween thriller human/bird hybrids escape from a group of mad scientists in order to save themselves – and half the world’s population – from extinction.

Best selling author James Peterson, best known for his upcoming book-turned-tv-series The Women’s Murder Club, into the youth market with the first in this series, Maximum Ride – School’s Out, Forever. Now with a website driven pre-teen following Peterson is rounding out the series while simultaneously prepping the whole thing for Hollywood.

Maximum Ride has been pitched as “what to read after Harry Potter,” but it doesn’t have the fantasy charm of Harry, nor is Patterson as skilled at writing to, but not down to young readers. This fast, fun book would be more accurately pitched as “Buffy meets the Transformers,” with a teenage heroine “Max” Ride taking the lead over a gang of six specially gifted child heroes. Kids 8-13 who like sci-fi and high tech thrillers will enjoy this book which includes everything that age group loves – teenage rebellion, a bit of kissing, and grown-ups who take the backseat to their brilliant, misunderstood children. Techy kids will especially enjoy the accompanying website which features a blog from Fang, one of the book’s main characters, along with pretty spiffy CG movie clips and lots of advance info on the series finale and the upcoming movies. (It’s brilliant marketing, to say the least. Maybe a mad scientist is working for the publisher…?)

Got a kid who would like this read? Maybe a reading-reluctant pre-teen boy you’re trying to entice into some summer reading? Tuck your email into the comments and one lucky reader will get to join Max and her gang on thrill seeking ride.

This review is sponsored by MotherTalk, but the reviewer has forgone any compensation for the review.