A glad new year to all the earth...

Book to Reel: A Christmas Carol for Scrooge

There are many film versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, some traditional, some modern, some with a twist. The truth is, I can watch any of them and enjoy it. It is such a powerful tale of redemption that it works regardless of casting, setting, or medium. Scrooge McDuck is as poignant a Scrooge as any. Bill Murray is funny and tender in the aptly named Scrooged (with John Forsythe clearly reveling in the Marley role). Jim Carrey delivers a lovely vocal performance in the 2009 animated version. I even enjoy Barbie in A Christmas Carol, not to mention the dozens of made for television versions featuring a looser rendition of the tale. But whenever I talk to people about A Christmas Carol, it usually seems like the first version they saw is their favorite, and that is certainly the case with me. In 1970, at only thirty-four years of age, Albert Finney portrayed the famous old miser in a musical adaptation (I do love a good musical!) simply titled Scrooge, and for me, he is the ultimate personification of the character.

Finney won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical for this role, and it’s easy to see why. He carries himself like a man in his sixties, stooping slightly, affecting a Bell’s Palsy-like curl to his lip and a high-pitched fussiness to his tone. His make-up and styling are brilliant. I can’t detect any cosmetics aging him; it is all so realistically applied, and the addition of sparse, greasy hair and dirty fingernails completes his metamorphosis. In the flashback scenes when he travels to his youth with the Ghost of Christmas Past, we see how young and handsome he really was at the time of the filming, making the juxtaposition of his younger and older selves all the more startling.

Come on it's Lovely Weather for Sleigh Bells and Skating Parties!

Winter sports have been popular in America for hundreds of years. But in the 1800s and early 20th century, winter pastimes not only provided fun and exercise, they also served as much-anticipated and enjoyed social gatherings. One of the most popular pastimes of all was ice-skating, described in an 1886 newspaper as “Our National Winter Exercise.” Frozen ponds and rivers were always busy in the winter, and nighttime skating parties like those described in Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rose O’ the River were favorite amusements, especially for young people:

“Never had there been . . . such wonderful skating. The river was one gleaming, glittering thoroughfare of ice from Milliken’s Mills to the dam at the Edgewood bridge. At sundown bonfires were built here and there on the mirror-like surface, and all the young people from the neighboring villages gathered on the ice.”

Worth a Thousand Words: The Christmas Coach

This is The Christmas Coach by American painter Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, and it's just one of seventy-eight scenes from American history in his series, The Pageant of a Nation. It is the largest series of American historical paintings by a single artist. Ferris began painting the series in 1895, and when the entire series was completed, it was exhibited in Ferris's hometown of Philadelphia, at Independence Hall from 1913 to 1930.

The Christmas Coach depicts a scene in Philadelphia in 1795 and features a wealthy woman departing the coach just before sunset on Christmas Eve to a snow-covered street filled with a representation of the great diversity of one of early America's largest cities. The street bustles with the spirit of the season as middle class families, soldiers, servants, Native Americans, and frontiersmen dodge covered wagons, horses, and dogs as they run their errands and make their way home for their Christmas celebrations.

Need some help getting into the holiday spirit? Our newest release is a vintage Christmas treat! Heartwarming, inspirational, and full of wit and charm!

The Romance of a Christmas Card by Kate Douglas Wiggin

Professionally edited and formatted for today's e-readers, and featuring chapter artwork, a glossary, and the touching Christmas poem "Das Krist Kindel." Download the Legacy Vintage Collection Enhanced eBook Edition today for 99₵! 

On Location: Winter in Woodstock

And then, all of a sudden, in the early, brisk winter twilight, Woodstock—happened!

Climbing out of the train Stanton stood for a second rubbing his eyes at the final abruptness and unreality of it all. Woodstock!

What was it going to mean to him?

In Molly Make-Believe, Eleanor Hallowell Abbott's charming novella about a young businessman who falls in love with his anonymous pen-pal "Molly" while recuperating from an illness, Carl Stanton’s quest to track down the elusive Molly eventually takes him to the town of Woodstock, Vermont. His trip (and the reader’s) through the town is swift, but just a few words of description—“[a] transient vista of village lights; a brief, narrow, hill-bordered road that looked for all the world like the aisle of a toy-shop, flanked on either side by high-reaching shelves where miniature house-lights twinkled cunningly”—paint an enticing picture of a charming, old-fashioned New England village on a snowy night.

Sample Sunday: The Romance of a Christmas Card

          

Get it today for 99¢!

 

The newest addition to the Legacy Vintage Collection is a heartwarming tale set in Beulah, New Hampshire, in 1916, where one special Christmas card has the power to unite the town in the spirit of the season, as two wayward sons find their way home and a lonely young mother’s prayers are answered. In this sample from Chapter Two, Reba Larrabee, the minister's wife, finds inspiration for a Christmas card in her best friend Letty:

Letty, do you remember I told you I'd been trying my hand on some verses for a Christmas card?"

"Yes; have you sent them anywhere?"

"Not yet. I couldn't think of the right decoration and color scheme and was afraid to trust it all to the publishers. Now I've found just what I need for one of them, and you gave it to me, Letty!"

"I?"