Living Books Library wishes you and your children a blessed Christmas. Here are a couple of poems to accompany your last-minute preparations and celebrations. It is the end of the year in the world, and the beginning of the year in the church, a calendar reminder of the truth that “Behold, he makes all things… Read More Fourth Week of Advent
Christmas gifts and Christmas journeys fill our thoughts and days this month. We share this experience with thousands who have gone before, not the least of which was the mother of our Lord, as these poems acknowledge: Mary’s BurdenByEleanor Farjeon My Baby and Burden,Tomorrow the mornI shall go lighterAnd you will be born. I shall… Read More Third Week of Advent
Perhaps nothing more obviously demonstrates the joy of the Christmas season than the constant presence of music. The contagious joy in the world is felt and mimicked even by the secular celebrations that surround us with songs everywhere we go. Unique to Christmas is its carols, those special songs telling and retelling the joy and… Read More Second Week of Advent
So many of our earliest childhood memories involve Christmas time. Every element of the holiday enchants them, the focus of attention on a child in a manger delights them. I remember enacting the Bethlehem story in Sunday school pageants, donning the cardboard angel wings and trying to sing like an angel. The atmosphere was almost… Read More When Children Sing Gloria
The celebration of Christmas with music is an ancient practice, and that this tradition continues is especially remarkable in our time when tolerance of anything old is disdained and eagerness for the new is an obsession. Yet, the traditional Advent song of O Come, O Come Emmanuel has been passed down to us for at least 1,200 years, is heard… Read More O Come, O Come
During the Advent season, we focus on our favorite part of the Story of God, the entry into the world of our hero in the flesh, the birth awaited by all throughout the ages until that night in Bethlehem. Though we know the story well, and how it turns out, we revel all over again in the thrill… Read More Long Expected
Last Friday night my husband and I found ourselves home with just the boys and nothing urgent on the calendar. Bliss. What to do? We picked up one of the Christmas books I had pulled from the library to try to get to this season: The Christmas Stove by Alta Halverson Seymour. We finished it an hour… Read More Simple Truths