A Northern Christmas by Rockwell Kent

10 Days Until Christmas

I found this book at Bells Bookstore in Palo Alto, back when I would sneak to bookstore to escape the  high tech insanity. Bells is a wonderful family run, independent bookstore with rare and used books. If I remember, this wasn’t very expensive and the only reason I can recall where it came from is Bells bookmark is still in the book.  Barbara Wohl (now retired from the store)  is a well-known heritage rose gardener and her garden just up the street from the store is to die for. But I digress…

At merely 20 pages, I knew this tiny book with it’s decorated sleeve and cover was mine before I even opened it.  A short story which tells of a father and young son spending Christmas in a small hand built cabin in 1918, just a few miles from the Arctic Circle,   Rockwell Kent is the graphic artist probably best known for his magnificent illustrations for Moby Dick and the complete works of Shakespeare.   Here and   Here

Mr. Kent published WILDERNESS, A Journal of Quiet Adventure  in Alaska in 1941 and this is taken from that larger published work.  The introduction explains he had this little volume reprinted as Christmas presents for all his friends a few years later.   Here’s a couple of the illustrations from A Northern Christmas  — aren’t they just wonderful?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the holiday approaches Mr. Kent and his son improvise their holiday cheer with a tree, hand made ornaments and candles.  The second photo here shows the menu they cobbled together as a holiday feast for their only neighbor Olson, a weather beaten gold miner who prepared carefully for the occasion with hair specially clipped around his hears and a gold nugget stickpin in his silk tie.  Beans a la Resurrection Bay anyone?

Some other special selections from this Christmas tale (and yes the dates are printed in red in the book  – a charming touch):

Thursday, December nineteenth.  This day is never to be forgotten, so beautiful, so calm, so still with the earth and every branch and tree muffled in deep feathery, new fallen snow.  And all day the softest clouds have drifted lazily over the heaven, shrouding the land here and there with veils of falling snow, while elsewhere or through the snow itself the sun shone.  Golden shadows, dazzling peaks, fairy tracery of branches against the blue summer sea!  It was a day to Live, – and work could be forgotten.

Christmas Eve.  We’ve cleaned the house, stowed everything away upon shelves and hooks, and in corners, moved even my easel aside; decorated the roof timbers with dense hemlock boughs, stowed quantities of wood behind the stove — for there must be no work on that holiday – and now both Rockwell and I are in a state of suppressed excitement over tomorrow.   What a strange thing! Nothing is coming to us, no change in any respect in the routine of our lives but what we make ourselves – and yet the day looms so large and magnificent before us!  I suppose the greatest festivals of our lives are those at which we dance ourselves.

The underline is mine …

Wishing you a happy holiday countdown with your own festivals.