Great Christmas Stories.

I admit that we are going rather light on school this week. We have spent a lot of time reading Christmas books. I picked up a bunch (10 of them to be precise. We are only allowed 5 per library card) of them last week and then picked up another 10 books this week. Many of the books are the same ones we have read for the past few years and others are new ones that I just decided to give a try. We have really enjoyed many of them while others are.... well lets just say we aren't going to be keeping them or checking them out again.

Here are two that we really liked from this weeks stash.
The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey is a lovely story about how one man is brought out of his gloom by a little boy and a nativity set. It made we want to get out our Nativities. But I am holding out until Monday which is when I told the kids we would get out all the Christmas stuff. We will see if I don't relent and get them out tomorrow.

I also found this one was made into a movie. It is over a hour and a half long so it really fleshes out the story and very beautifully filmed. My kids really loved watching the story come to life in this film version.

The other book we really connected with isn't a particularly spiritual book but it was one we could relate to. It is called My Penguin Osbert. The little boy in the book has his heart set on a penguin and then when he gets it he realizes that it isn't quite so fun to have a penguin and wants Santa to take it back.

I remember one year Sophie told every Santa she came across that she really wanted a stuffed Cheshire cat that she had seen at Costco. It was the only thing she wanted and just knew that Santa would come through. It ended up being by her Stocking Christmas morning and she was thrilled. But when night time came, she didn't want to sleep with it or even have it in her room with her. It had to sleep out in the living room because it was too scary. She continued to have bad dreams about this Cheshire Cat so we ended up getting rid of it.

I remind her of this Cheshire cat whenever she wants something that she feels she just has to have in hopes that she will think about the gift and make sure it is really what she wants.

It is a good thing there are so many Christmas books at the library. We are going through a bunch of them everyday. I think I need to get Ian and Henry library cards so that they too can each check out 5 books. Then we could have 20 Christmas books out at the same time. We have gone through that many this week. Do you have any that you think we really need to try?