A beautiful New England Christmas story in the tradition of Dylan Thomas' remembrance, A Child's Christmas in Wales.

In December of 1940, twelve-year-old Donnie Hall gets on a train from his comfortable Connecticut home to fulfill a dream: to spend Christmas with his grandparents on their farm on Eagle Pond in south central New Hampshire.

Once there, he settles into the routines he knows well from his summer visits: helping Gramps milk the cows, gathering eggs from the henhouse, chopping wood for the Glenwood in the kitchen. But some things had changed.

Winter milk was now picked up not by sleighs drawn by work horses on snow-packed roads, but by gasoline powered trucks. The fancy old red sleigh that had served the family so well was languishing, abandoned in a stall in the barn, and, not far from it, Old Riley, the loyal horse that had pulled that sleigh, and much else, for a quarter century. Donnie arrives on a Sunday and is due to leave on Thursday. But Wednesday night, the nor'easter blows in and the farm is buried in two feet of snow. The road is unplowed; the car is useless. Will Donnie make it to the station in time to catch the train back to Boston?

All this never happened. Donald Hall never did spend a childhood Christmas at Eagle Pond. But he knew all the stories from his mother and his grandparents and, now in his eighties, and having lived in that same house of his grandparents since 1975, he is in the perfect position to give himself "the thing I most wanted, a childhood Christmas at Eagle Pond."

About the Author
Donald Hall was not only one of America's poet laureates but one of the great personal essayists. "If any American writer deserves the description of 'man of letters,'" the New York Times Book Review wrote, "it is Donald Hall." Mr. Hall approached writing as he approached life-with simplicity, affection, and a wry wit. He distilled the human experience with a sense of humor that readers will return to again and again, each time learning something new. His work glows with the affection he held for the land, the people, and the customs of rural New England, and especially for the small, New Hampshire dairy farm near Ragged Mountain he visited every summer as a child. Mary Azarian grew up on a small farm in Virginia, where she had horses, rabbits and chickens. After graduating from Smith College, where she studied printmaking with Leonard Baskin, she moved to a farm in northern Vermont. There she taught for four years in one of the last one-room schoolhouses in the state. She has been a full-time printmaker since 1969. Her books include A Farmer's Alphabet and the Caldecott Medal-winning Snowflake Bentley.


Book Information
ISBN 9781567926095
Author Donald Hall
Format Paperback
Page Count 104
Imprint David R. Godine Publisher Inc
Publisher David R. Godine Publisher Inc
Dimensions(mm) 175mm * 129mm * 10mm