The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree by Gloria Houston, pictures by Barbara Cooney, 1988.
Ruthie is a little girl living on a farm in Pine Grove in the Appalachian Mountains during World War I. (The story calls it The Great War because that was its name before WWII.) During the spring, Ruthie’s father selected a tree for the village church’s Christmas celebration. The local families take turns providing the tree, and it’s their family’s turn. Ruthie goes with him to pick out the right tree and mark it with a red ribbon.
However, during the summer, Ruthie’s father has to go away to be a soldier overseas. Ruthie and her mother tend the farm while her father is away, but money is tight. Ruthie thinks ahead to Christmas and prays for her father to come home and for a special Christmas present for herself – a pretty doll with a cream-colored dress with ribbons and lace.
In the fall of that year (1918), Ruthie’s father writes a letter, saying that the Armistice has been signed, meaning that the war is over, so he’s sure he’ll be home for Christmas. Ruthie and her mother keep waiting for him to arrive any day, but he doesn’t seem to come, and they don’t know exactly when to expect him.
At school, Ruthie is told that she will have the role of the heavenly angel in the Christmas play and that they are still expecting Ruthie’s father to supply the Christmas tree. Ruthie is looking forward to it, but Ruthie and her mother don’t have enough money for a new dress for the angel costume, and there is still the worry about when her father will return home, and if he will make it in time to cut the Christmas tree and take it to the church.
The local preacher tells them that the person who is due to provide a Christmas tree next year is willing to do it this year instead, if Ruthie’s father can’t get home in time, but Ruthie’s mother is still sure that their family can manage the tree. Ruthie’s mother decides that she and Ruthie will go get the tree themselves. It isn’t easy, but they manage it, and Ruthie’s mother also finds a way to make a dress for Ruthie’s angel costume.
However, there are two more things that would make this Christmas perfect for Ruthie – if her father returns home in time for Christmas and if she somehow receives the doll of her dreams.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
This is a sweet, old-fashioned Christmas story about wishes coming true. Wishes coming true at Christmas is a popular theme in Christmas stories, and in this book, they come true because Ruthie’s mother and Ruthie do what they need to do to make everything work out the way they want it to. They could have let someone else provide the Christmas tree, and no one would have thought less of them for doing it because the father of the family was still away, but they were determined to see their family’s promise to provide the Christmas tree through. The mother also uses her old wedding dress for the material for Ruthie’s angel costume, and it’s implied that she also made the angel doll for the top of the Christmas tree that becomes Ruthie’s special Christmas present.
The pictures are charming, and they fit well with the Cottagecore aesthetic that’s been popular in recent years.
Minna is a poor girl, the daughter of a coal miner. Her father has been ill with the miner’s cough, so Minna has to help her mother to make quilts that the family can sell for money. She wants to attend school, but she can’t because she is needed at home and her family can’t afford a warm coat for her when winter starts. It’s too bad because Minna really wants to make some friends her own age, and she would meet other children at school. Her father says that he will find a solution to the problem, but he dies before he can.
After Minna’s father’s death, some of the other women in the community come to the house to work on making quilts with Minna’s mother. When the women say that the quilt pattern they are using is named after Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors, Minna wishes again for a coat. When the other women, who are mothers themselves, realize that Minna cannot go to school until she has a coat, they decide to make one for her. They don’t have much money, but they do have plenty of quilting scraps. They decide to make a new, quilted coat for Minna out of their old scraps.
Minna starts going to school and does well, although she gets some teasing because, as a new student who has never been to school before, she has to sit with the youngest children, and Shane pulls her braid. Something that Minna particularly likes at school is Sharing Day (what my school always called “Show and Tell”), where students are given the chance to show special things to the class and talk about them. Minna decides that when her coat is ready, she will show it to the class during Sharing Day.
As the coat is being made, Minna admires all of the beautiful colors of the cloth scraps in the coat and adds a piece of her father’s old jacket as well. Each of the other scraps in the coat also has a story that goes with it. The cloth pieces come from old clothes and blankets that people in the families of the quilting mothers have used, and they memories attached to them. The mothers tell Minna all of the stories as they work on the coat, and Minna loves it.
However, when Minna wears the coat to school for the first time, the other kids make fun of her for wearing rags. Minna is really upset and runs away into the woods. After thinking about it, Minna remembers what her father said about how people really need other people, and she decides to go back to school. There, she tells the other students that the rags in her coat are actually their rags, and she begins reciting the stories that go with them.
One of the scraps is from Shane’s old blanket from when he was a baby. He was born so small that everyone was afraid that he’d die, but the blanket kept him warm, and he later carried it around with him until it fell apart. Shane is happy, seeing the scrap of his favorite blanket again in Minna’s coat. Everyone else gathers around Minna, looking for their scraps in the coat and listening to the stories behind them. Each of the scraps in Minna’s coat is like an old friend that none of them ever thought they’d see again. The other children apologize to Minna for their teasing and Minna says that friends share and that it took all of them to make her coat warm.
My Reaction
The book doesn’t say when this story is supposed to take place, but based on the children’s clothing, I think it’s about 100 years ago or more. It doesn’t say exactly where this story takes place, either, but a note on the dust jacket says that it takes place in Appalachia. The author said that she was inspired by Appalachian crafts that she learned from the women in her family and a patchwork coat that she wore as a child. However, years later, the author revisited this story and rewrote it in a longer version, and some of the explanations that accompany the new version of the story elaborate more on the background.
The author rewrote this story in a longer, novel form called Minna’s Patchwork Coat (2015). In the back of that book, the explanation behind the story mentions that the year of the story is 1908. It also discusses some cultural references and songs included in the expanded version of the story that were not part of the original. It states that the inspiration for this story came not only from the author’s experiences but from a song written by Dolly Parton, Coat of Many Colors, which was made into a picture book itself after the publication of this book.
There is also an expanded retelling of the story called Minna’s Patchwork Coat, and I’d like to talk about some of the differences. For example, the ending message of the story is slightly changed in the longer version, or at least the emphasis of the moral is different. The original book emphasized how much “people need people” and how the goodwill of many people (in the form of the quilting mothers and their hard work and scraps, cast-off from all of their children) changed Minna’s life. They emphasize it at the end, talking about how Minna’s coat is the warmest of all of them and that it took a lot of people to make it that way. However, in the expanded version, Minna also explains that when she started school, she liked her classmates better than they liked her because, thanks to their mothers’ stories as they made her coat, she already knew who the other children were, but none of them really knew anything about her. The message of the expanded version is that it is important to learn others’ stories to learn who they really are and to become friends with them.
Actually, I don’t like the second version of the story as well as the original. I thought that the moral and the story were stronger when the focus was on how people benefit from having relationships with other people because people can do great things when a lot of people contribute a little. Remember, it took a lot of people to make Minna’s coat warm because each of them contributed at least one scrap to it and others took the time to put them all together. It was their stories that made the coat special, more than just an ordinary coat. The expanded story has that element, too, but more emphasis is placed on Minna needing to share her story with the other children to win their respect and approval. I didn’t like the notion that Minna needed to win their approval by telling her story. Also, this story takes place in a small mining community. I find it difficult to believe that the other kids wouldn’t basically know her story already. Her mother knows their mothers. Their families see each other at church before Minna goes to school. The disease that took her father’s life isn’t terribly unusual for coal miners, and probably, a number of the other children are the children of coal miners as well. It seems to be the major industry in the area. Minna’s family might be more poor than the others’ since her father’s illness and death, but I don’t see why their circumstances would be so different and incomprehensible to people who must have seen her and her family around and who knew them from church or through their parents’ associations. One thing that small towns and communities are known for is everyone knowing everyone else and their business, so why didn’t they all know Minna’s story already? Even if the quilting mothers didn’t talk about helping to make the coat for Minna, the other kids should have known about the family’s money circumstances and the tragic death of Minna’s father. I don’t see why the other kids would have known so little about her or thought that she was so unusual.
The expanded version of the story also features a Cherokee midwife and a biracial friend for Minna who did not appear in the original story. This friend, Lester, is also something of an outcast among the other children, and Minna and the stories from her coat help the other children to be more accepting of him as well. It’s a nice thing, I guess, but it felt a little artificial to me because I knew that it wasn’t part of the original story. I hesitate to criticize it too much because the basic message of the story isn’t bad, but I guess that the way the second version came out just doesn’t have the same feel to me. The author put things into it that weren’t in the original, and with that change in emphasis on the ending, it makes the story and characters feel a little less natural to me now. I often feel the same way when I see a movie version of a story that adds things that weren’t in the original book.
When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Diane Goode, 1982.
This nostalgic picture book is based on the author’s experiences living with her grandparents in West Viriginia when she was young. It paints a vivid picture of Appalachian life in the past. The story doesn’t give any particular years to describe when it takes place, but the author apparently lived with her grandparents during the 1960s, although from the pictures, it would be easy to believe that the story takes place in a much earlier time. Partly, the style of the clothes and stoves give that impression, but for me, it was really the cloth cover over the camera that made me think it was during the first half of the 20th century. You can still get these covers, but they’re not as common in modern times.
In the story, the author describes various aspects of Appalachian life, starting each section with “When I was young in the Mountains . . .” She remembers her grandfather coming home after working in a coal mine and how they would all have cornbread, fried okra, and pinto beans for supper.
For fun, the kids would go swimming in the swimming hole. They would also use the swimming hole for baptisms. They would also use the schoolhouse as their church.
She describes the general store where her family would go for groceries and how they would have to heat water on the stove for baths.
Sometimes, they had to deal with snakes, and once, when their grandmother killed a particularly big one with a hoe, they took a picture of the children with it.
Overall, the story is about enjoying the simple pleasures in life in a place you love, surrounded by people you care about.
This is a Caldecott Honor Book. It is currently available online through Internet Archive. Sometimes, you can also find people reading this book aloud on YouTube. I particularly like this reading because I think the reader has a good accent for reading this story, and she comments on her own experiences growing up in the country.
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