Hanukkah at Valley Forge by Stephen Krensky, illustrated by Greg Harlin, 2006.
It’s a cruel winter at Valley Forge, during the American Revolution, and George Washington is worried about the welfare and morale of his soldiers.
As Washington walks through the camp, he sees a young soldier lighting a candle and reciting something softly to himself.
Curious about what he’s doing, Washington stops to talk to him, casually remarking on how cold the night is. The young soldier says that he saw colder nights when he was young in Poland, and he is lighting candles for Hanukkah. Washington asks him what that means, and the soldier explains the meaning of the holiday.
The soldier recounts the story of how Israel was conquered by the Ancient Greeks, who forced Jewish people to worship Greek gods and tried to replace Jewish customs with Greek ones. Washington also says that he understands what it’s like to feel like you’re under the thumb of a king who lives far away and the desire for liberty. The Jewish soldier says his family left Poland for similar reasons, because they were not being allowed to practice their beliefs there.
Returning to the story of the ancient Israelites, the soldier explains that a priest named Mattathias refused the Greeks’ orders to bow to idols, and he fought back against the Greeks. Mattathias and his five sons, who were called the Maccabees, led a rebellion against the Greeks. They were a small group, and the odds were against them, but they were determined to continue the fight against their oppressors. Washington says that he understands the feeling because his army is in a similar position.
Continuing the story, the soldier recounts how Mattathias’s son, Judah, inspired their troops by reminding them that God was on their side, leading them to victory. When they finally managed to overthrow their Greek rulers, they took back their Temple and lit the Temple menorah. The menorah was supposed to be kept lit constantly, and they were worried because there was very little oil left. They only had enough to keep it burning for one day, and they weren’t sure when they could get more oil. However, they lit the menorah anyway, trusting that God would somehow provide them with more soon. It took them eight days to find more oil for the menorah, but to their surprise, the menorah continued to stay lit all the time they were searching, lasting eight times longer than they thought it would with the amount of oil they had. Hanukkah became the commemoration of this miracle.
George Washington contemplates the story that the soldier told him, and he finds it inspiring. It reminds him that, even though their current situation in Valley Forge may seem bleak, there have been others before them who have also faced steep odds in their struggles and who still managed to succeed. He begins to think that, if they persevere, they may also be gifted with a miracle of their own.
There is an author’s note at the end of the book that explains the inspiration behind the story. As the characters in the story do, the author draws parallels between the American Revolutionary War and the historical battle that began the tradition of Hanukkah. The author learned that George Washington may have learn about Hanukkah during the Revolutionary War, although there are no entries in his diary to confirm it, so he used excerpts from George Washington’s other writings to explain his sentiments. The author also offers commentary on bullies and the importance of standing up to oppressors, both in the context of war and in daily life.
This book won the Sydney Taylor award from the Association of Jewish Libraries.
My Reaction
I love books that include little-known or lesser-known events. Whether this one happened or happened in the way the author tells it is difficult to verify, and it seems likely that it’s more of a folk tale than an historical account. George Washington was a real, historical person, but so many legends have grown up around his life that it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether certain stories about him actually happened. As the author says, Washington’s own diary doesn’t offer any verification about this particular incident. Other reviewers of this book, including J. L. Bell, who specializes in Revolutionary War history in the Boston area, have attempted to trace the origins of this particular story about Washington learning about Hanukkah during the Revolutionary War. In his blog, J. L. Bell explains the known sources for this story, which vary in their description of exactly when the encounter between Washington and the Jewish soldier took place and what the soldier’s name was. The soldiers who have been credited with having this encounter with George Washington were real people, but there’s nothing that definitively proves that the discussion about Hanukkah actually happened with any of them. The story is probably more folklore than history, and Bell believes that it started to circulate during the 20th century, when there were more immigrants arriving from Poland with stories and experiences like the one the Polish soldier in the story tells about not being allowed to practice their religion openly. Even so, the parallels the story draws between the ancient rebellion of the Maccabees and the American Revolution are fascinating.
There are certain feelings that are universal among humans, and the author’s point that nobody likes being oppressed by a bully, whether that bully is another person or a government or an army, is true. No matter what you’re up against in life, perseverance in the face of hardship is important, and miracles can come to those who continue to stand up for themselves and what they believe in. It is also true that people who come from different sets of circumstances can help to inspire each other by sharing common feelings about their struggles.
Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, 1985, 1989.
On the first night of Hanukkah, a tired travel, Hershel, trudges through the snow on his way to the next village. There, he hopes to get something to eat and celebrate the holiday with the local villagers. However, when he reaches the village, nobody is celebrating.
When he asks the villagers why they’re not celebrating, they tell him that they can’t because there are goblins haunting the old synagogue on the hill. Every time they try to celebrate Hanukkah, the goblins come after them, blow out the candles on their menorahs, breaks their dreidels, and throw all the potato latkes on the floor.
Hershel decides that he isn’t scared of the goblins, and he’s going to put an end to their mischief. The village rabbi says that the only way to get rid of the goblins is to spend all eight nights of Hanukkah in the synagogue, lighting Hanukkah candles every night. Then, on the final night of Hanukkah, the goblin king must light the candles himself. Although this sounds difficult, Hershel is confident that he can do it. Although the villagers aren’t really expecting Hershel to succeed, they support Hershel in his mission, and they give him some food, a menorah, candles, and matches.
The old synagogue is creepy, and when Hershel lights his first candle, a small goblin appears to ask him what he’s doing. Herself isn’t intimidated by the little goblin, and he tricks the goblin into thinking that he’s strong enough to crush rocks in his hands by squeezing a hard-boiled egg in his hands until it breaks. The little goblins is scared away but warns him that bigger goblins than him will come later. The next night, a bigger goblin comes, but he isn’t very bright and gets his hand stuck in a jar of picks when he tries to take too many. The night after that, tricks the third goblin into playing dreidel with him and giving him all his gold.
It continues like this, night after night, with Hershel tricking the goblins in various ways so that they’ll let him light the candles on his menorah. Finally, Hershel comes face-to-face with the most sinister goblin of all – the king of the goblins. Can Hershel find a way to trick him and get him to light the candles of the menorah himself?
The book is a Caldecott Honor Book and named a Sydney Taylor Honor Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). It was originally published as a short story in Cricket magazine and later as a book, which is why the story has two copyright dates.
My Reaction
I’m not Jewish, and I admit that this isn’t a book I read as a kid, although I do remember that it was one that was often recommended when I was young. As an adult, I decided to try it, since I just never got around to it before. I really do like this story. I enjoyed the folklore elements, and I also appreciated that the main character saves Hanukkah, in much the same way that various characters had to “save” Christmas when I was a kid.
It makes me laugh to think about it now, but Christmas always seemed to be an extremely endangered holiday in Christmas television specials from my childhood. Some evil person or being was always out to destroy Christmas, for various reasons, with varying degrees of logic, and popular television characters always had to “save” it from being destroyed or canceled or whatever. It was fun and entertaining, but when you consider the entire canon of endangered Christmas holiday specials all together, it does seem like there isn’t a single year when Christmas isn’t in danger from somebody or something, making it weirdly routine for Christmas to almost not happen. At some point, I think my brother pointed out that Christmas was always in danger, but it seemed like Hanukkah was relatively safe. (At least, in the land of holiday-themed winter television specials starring well-known cartoon characters.) I figured that Christmas was likely a bigger target for the forces of evil due to its wide mass appeal because there were just more people who celebrated Christmas where I lived than Hanukkah (and also because of the all the related Christmas toy tie-in commercials and advertising sponsors for those shows).
So, I was delighted to see Hanukkah get saved from a band of comically nefarious goblins in this book. The goblin king is a sinister figure in the pictures, but fortunately, he’s not too much brighter than his cohorts. The book has been adapted as a stage play (you can sometimes find clips or trailers from performances on YouTube), and there is also an animated short film of the story. I think it would be fun to see a longer version, though, in video or movie form. The book skims over the details of what Hershel does to trick some of the other goblins after the third one, so there’s room to elaborate and make the story longer. I think I would have been a little scared by the final goblin when I was a little kid, but the goblins not being particularly bright and easy to trick does help remove some of the scare factor.
At first, I though that the story of Hershel might have been a folktale because it reads like one. In the back of the book, the author explains that he wanted to write a story that was somewhat like A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens but about Hanukkah, and he took his inspiration from the folktale Invanko, the Bear’s Son (also known as Jean de l’Ours or John the Bear), which is includes the hero tricking a goblin, and he added in a Jewish folk hero, Hershel of Ostropol. The resulting story is sort of like a new folktale, remixed from old ones, which is fitting because that’s what happens with folk stories Overall, I thought it was a fun story.
The Little Fir Tree by Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Jim Lamarche, 1954, 2005.
A little fir tree feels lonely among the large trees in the forest, but something happens that changes his life forever – he is chosen to be a living Christmas tree for a little boy!
One winter, the boy’s father carefully digs up the tree and brings it home to his young son, who cannot walk because of a lame leg. The boy has been wanting to see the trees in the forest, but since he can’t go to the forest himself, his father has brought a free to him. The little fir tree loves being decorated, and the next evening, guests come and gather around him, singing Christmas carols.
In the springtime, the boy’s father takes the tree back to the forest, where he found it, and he plants the tree again so it will continue to grow. However, the following winter, the boy’s father returns to dig up the tree again and take it back to the boy for Christmas.
The little fir tree loves this ritual of visiting the boy and his family and being their Christmas tree every winter, but the next winter after that, the man doesn’t come to dig him up. The little tree is disappointed and lonely, but he is in for a surprise. This winter, the boy and his family come to see him in the forest!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, although that copy has different illustrations.
My Reaction
I mainly know Margaret Wise Brown for Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, but I found this Christmas story charming. I don’t like Christmas stories from the point of view of trees that are cut down, like the Hans Christian Andersen story, The Fir-Tree, which has a really depressing ending. I like it that this family in this book keeps the tree alive, returning it to the forest every year to continue growing. Things change for both the boy and the tree over the years, as they both continue to grow, but they change for the better, and they continue to be fond of each other and a source of inspiration for each other.
When I was a kid, our elementary school had a large tree on a hill on the kindergarten playground, and the story behind it was that it was once a living Christmas tree from the very first kindergarten class at the school. That tree is still there and alive today, about 50 years after it was first planted there and more than 30 years after I used to play under it. I like to imagine that it will be true of the little fir tree, too, that it will continue growing over the years.
Earlier versions of this book had different illustrations, but personally, I love the illustrations in this printing because they’re detailed and realistic. The version on Internet Archive has illustrations by Barbara Cooney, who is known for Roxaboxen and Miss Rumphius. Cooney’s illustrations are also good, but not as realistic as Larmarche’s, and they’re in a limited color range.
One other difference between versions of the book is that the earlier version also included the musical notes for the carols that the children sing and additional songs that aren’t included in the later version of the book. I enjoy books that include actual music and lyrics, like books that include recipes, because they are fun extras and add an extra dimension to the story by providing an accompanying activity. Although I like the more detailed and realistic illustrations of newer edition of this book, I do prefer the actual music and wider range of songs from the older version.
In this Scandinavian Christmas story, young Treva and her brother Sami are getting ready for Christmas when strange things start to happen.
First, Treva feels like someone is watching them when they go to pick out a Christmas tree in the forest. Then, after they start decorating for Christmas, some of their decorations start to disappear. They had already wrapped Christmas presents and hidden them away, but they discover that those are gone, too!
Treva begins to realize what is causing these disappearances when she spots their Christmas pudding, apparently moving quickly across the snow, stuck to the back of a hedgehog! Treva follows the hedgehog and pudding into the forest, where she finds two trolls, pulling the pudding up into their tree house.
In the tree house, Treva finds the trolls arguing over all of the Christmas things they’ve taken from Treva’s family. Treva confronts them about stealing their Christmas things. The trolls say that they just want Christmas. They’re like small children who want something but don’t know how to get it or make it for themselves, so they just started trying to take it from other people.
Treva tells them that she will show them what to do for Christmas. She helps them clean up their little house, make decorations, and decorate their tree for Christmas.
She also explains to them that arguing and being greedy isn’t the proper Christmas spirit, and it’s been ruining their mood. She tells them to try cooperating with each other and playing nicely together while they decorate. Finally, she teaches them that Christmas is about being generous and giving something to each other, not just taking things. To demonstrate what she means, she gives them their first Christmas present, her favorite Christmas decoration.
With the trolls now able to have Christmas on their own, Treva is able to reclaim the rest of her family’s Christmas presents and decorations. However, the trolls and their hedgehog friend have one more special Christmas present to give now that they understand what giving is.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
This is a fun Christmas story with beautiful, colorful illustrations! I really loved the pictures in the book, with all the colorful Christmas decorations. The designs of the family’s Christmas decorations are traditional Scandinavian decorations. The side and bottom panels of the illustrations also explain some of what’s happening even before the main character understands.
I also loved the designs of the troll and their fun hedgehog friend. Around the time this story was published, troll dolls, which have existed since the late 1950s, were having a rise in popularity. The trolls in this story somewhat resemble troll dolls, with their fluffy hair rising to a point, although the troll dolls have more colorful hair options. I enjoy stories that use fantasy creatures, especially ones that aren’t especially common. The trolls in this story are troublesome, but in a little kid manner, not overly threatening. They’re more about mild magical mischief and lessons they have to learn.
A Pioneer Thanksgiving by Barbara Greenwood, illustrated by Heather Collins, 1999.
This book is part story, part history, and part craft and activity book. It tells the story of a particular pioneer family’s Thanksgiving celebration in 1841 to explain the sort of Thanksgiving celebrations that pioneer families would have at the time, and there are related activities and recipes to accompany the story.
Everyone in the Robertson family helps with preparing the food for the Thanksgiving feast, including the family’s neighbors, who will be joining them. The story is episodic, focusing on different family members and their adventures and activities through the Thanksgiving preparations.
As they begin their preparations, they are worried about Granny, who is unwell. Mrs. Robertson is afraid that she might die because she doesn’t seem to be improving. As Sarah reads to her, Granny expresses a wish to taste her mother’s cranberry sauce one more time.
Sarah decides to go out and gather some cranberries for the sauce herself, but her little sister, Lizzie, tags along with her. The cranberry bog isn’t safe. Lizzie falls in and nearly drowns. Sarah manages to save her, but she’s very upset at almost losing Lizzie. However, her brother George finds Sarah’s basket of cranberries and brings it back to the house. The first activity in the book is a recipe for cranberry sauce.
Willie, one of the boys in the family, almost gets lost while looking for chestnuts for his mother’s chestnut stuffing, and he plays a game of Conkers with a Native American (First Peoples) friend, whose family trades foods with the Robertson family. Part of the story explains about Ojibwa and Iroquois thanksgiving ceremonies, and there are instructions in the book for playing Conkers with chestnuts and a Native American game with peach stones.
The younger children go into the woods to gather nuts, and there are instructions for weaving a nutting basket. Meg, the oldest girl in the family, makes bread with interesting designs, and there’s a recipe for bread. Sarah makes a Corn Dolly, and Granny explains the superstition of making a Corn Dolly and then plowing the Corn Dolly back into the soil at the beginning of the next planting season to ensure a good harvest.
Mr. Burkholder, their neighbor, tells them a story about when his family had newly arrived in North America and they had little food. Then, there is a section about weather and now to make a weather vane. Finally, everyone gathers at the table to say grace and enjoy the feast!
In the back of the book, there is a section about the history of Thanksgiving as a holiday in North America, both in the US and Canada. This book is actually set in Canada, and it explains that the date of Canandian Thanksgiving celebrations wasn’t initially fixed. Sometimes, they could be in October and sometimes in November. Canadian Thanksgiving was finally established as the second Monday in October in 1957.
I couldn’t find a copy of this book online, but I did find a copy on Internet Archive of a related book by the same author about the same pioneer family in Canada.
My Reaction
Although the book doesn’t say exactly where this family is other than North America, the other book about the family establishes that they are in Canada, and the references to Native Americans as “First Peoples” confirms it. When I first started reading the book, I thought that the pioneer family was somewhere in the United States or its territories. The lifestyle that the Canadian pioneers lived seems very similar to the way pioneers in the United States lived around that time, so I think the recounting of this family’s holiday would still be of interest to fans of the Little House on the Prairie series and similar books.
Hearing about Canadian Thanksgiving was interesting, and I liked the inclusion of information about the Thanksgiving traditions of the First Peoples and immigrants to Canada. The family in the story was originally from Scotland, and the grandmother in the story talks about how Thanksgiving celebrations remind her of the Harvest Home celebrations back in Scotland.
The book has a good selection of different types of activities for readers to try, from recipes to games to crafts. It seems like there is something here that could appeal to many people with different interests. Each of the activities appears next to a part of the story that references it, so readers can feel like they’re taking part in the activities along with the people in the story. I also really love the realistic art style in the illustrations!
Emily thinks that she has the best costume for the upcoming Halloween party! It’s a beautiful dress that makes her feel elegant and magical.
Emily takes the costume on the bus to show her grandmother, but somehow, the box with the costume in it disappears during the ride. Emily is upset at losing the costume and doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t want to go to the party as something ordinary, like a pumpkin.
Then, her grandmother suggests that she just go as herself. As herself, Emily is truly unique!
My Reaction
I liked the grandmother’s unorthodox solution to the problem of the missing costume. I can understand a kid loving a particular costume so much that it seems like nothing else will do, but showing Emily that she’s just fine going to the party as herself is a good way to show her that she is just fine as she is, just being herself. Emily would have liked going with the costume she loved, but she doesn’t need any costume in particular because she is good enough by herself.
Easter Stories for Children edited by Van B. Hooper, 1962.
This book was published by Ideals, and if I remember right, is part of a series of holiday/seasonal books for children. (I don’t have a list of other books in the series, though.) It has short stories and poems about Easter. Largely, they’re not very religious in tone, tending to focus on fairies and the Easter bunny. I actually found all the references to fairies confusing because I never heard anybody talk about fairies being associated with Easter when I was a kid. On the religious side, there is one poem about prayer and a story about how the dogwood plant represents the crucifixion. There is also some information about how Easter is celebrated around the world.
The pictures are in sepia tones. Mostly, they’re drawings, but there are also some photographs of cute bunnies and kittens wearing human clothes. The only full color pictures are on the inside of the front and back covers, and they’re scenes of rabbits painting Easter eggs. All in all, it’s a very cute book for Easter.
Stories:
How the Forest Fairies Get Ready for Spring – “Written especially for you by SPARKIE” – All of the forest fairies have special tasks for getting ready for spring.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (1886-1943) – A classic children’s story about a bunny who disobeys his mother.
Just After Easter by Maryjane McCarthy – Mr. Bunny Rabbit is worried about next Easter because the farmer is having trouble affording grain to feed his chickens. If he can’t keep the chickens, where will they get their Easter eggs? This is the story that has pictures of bunnies and kittens in costumes with props. The kittens try various ways to raise money for the chickens.
The Legend of the Dogwood – author unknown – The legend is that the cross of Jesus’s Crucifixion was made from dogwood, but the plant felt badly about it, so Jesus made the plant too small to be used for such a purpose again and gave it a cross-shaped flower.
Easter in Many Lands – About Easter customs in different countries, and the origins of the word “Easter” and how symbols like bunnies and eggs came to be associated with Easter. This is my favorite section in the book!
The Story of the Colored Easter Egg by “Maryjane” – A fairytale about a kind queen and the origins of Easter eggs.
Poems:
The Magic Pool by Dorothy Weiner – Bunnies color eggs in a magical pond fed by a rainbow.
Easter Bunny’s Secret by Mrs. Roy L. Peifer – The Easter bunny collects drops of paint that Jack Frost uses to paint leaves in autumn and saves them for Easter eggs, but when the paint gets spilled, he needs to get colors from other sources.
The Little Spring Spirit by Leonie Miller – The spirit of spring calls to plants and animals with the change of the season.
If Easter Eggs Would Hatch by Douglas Malloch – What would come out of an Easter egg? Brightly-colored chickens or maybe a little silver bunny?
In Cottontail Town by Marguerite Gode – A famly in Cottontail Town takes in an elderly rabbit and nurses him back to health. He starts a school there to teach the other rabbits how to paint Easter eggs.
The Gray Bunny’s Night – “As told by The big black Bumblebee” – A little gray bunny wants to be brightly colored for Easter, and his wish is granted by the queen of the fairies.
Hippety-Hop to the Barbershop by Claribel Ream – The Easter Bunny is going to the barbershop to deliver eggs and candy for the barber’s children.
Helping One Another by Mrs. Roy L. Peifer – The Little Red Hen helps the Easter Bunny to fill his basket for Easter.
His Bunny by Marilyn Jean Fais – About a little boy’s stuffed bunny. It can be hard on a toy to be a child’s favorite, worn and dragged everywhere, but it’s worth it!
Prayer by Ethel Romig Fuller – If we can hear songs from radio waves that travel through the air, God can also hear prayers.
Seed Thoughts by W. M. Walker – Good and kind thoughts produce good deeds, like plants sprouting from seeds, but selfish thoughts are like weeds that get in the way. Be careful what seed thoughts you grow in the garden of your mind!
Jack in the Pulpit by Mrs. Jessie S. Manifold – Spring plants and animals celebrate the Sabbath Day.
And He Hippety-Hopped Away by Rowena Bastin Bennett – The Easter Bunny delivers eggs and candy to children before sunrise.
A farm family in 1881 lives in their barn because they haven’t built a separate house yet. Outside the barn, there is an old apple tree that the family loves.
They like to pick the apples from the tree, and use them for cider and applesauce. The two girls in the family like to climb the tree. Josie, the younger girl, likes to swing on the vines that hang from the tree’s branches. Katrina, the older girl, likes to draw in the tree with her paper resting against a crooked branch. She thinks of that special limb as her “studio.”
Then, a terrible winter storm ruins the apple tree before Christmas. The whole family is sad at the loss of the tree, but Katrina is particularly devastated at the loss of her studio. Will she even be able to draw again if she can’t craw in her special place?
The family uses most of the ruined tree as firewood, and they use apples they’ve saved from the tree as decorations on their Christmas tree. However, because of the loss of the apple tree, it doesn’t really feel like Christmas to Katrina. Then, their father shows them that he has saved their favorite parts of the tree and turned them into special Christmas presents.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I thought this was a charming Christmas story! When I first saw the title, I guessed that the family would use an apple tree as a Christmas tree, but that’s not it at all. It’s just about the family feeling sad about the loss of their apple tree and how the remains of the tree made it a memorable Christmas. Because the father of the family saved their favorite parts of the tree when he was cutting up the rest for firewood, they will still be able to enjoy the things they loved about the tree, particularly Katrina, who receives a special drawing table made out her favorite branch of the tree.
The author dedicated the book to her own father because he made a special drawing board for her. On the inside dust jacket of the book, the explains that the inspiration for the apple tree and vine swing came from her own childhood in rural Michigan.
I love the artwork in this book! The pictures are realistic and detailed, and they have an old-fashioned charm that fits well with the modern Cottagecore aesthetic. I love the family’s home in the barn, with the girls sleeping in the loft and being wrapped in colorful patchwork quilts! The first book that I read by this author was The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash, but she wasn’t the illustrator for that book. I didn’t know the she did illustrations, but seeing the illustrations in this book makes me want to see more by her!
Colonial American Holidays and Entertainment by Karen Helene Lizon, 1993.
This book explains how people living in Colonial America would entertain themselves and celebrate holidays. Both entertainment and holidays varied between time periods and geographical areas.
In the early days of European colonies in North America, life was hard. People were occupied with daily survival and the establishment of their communities. As their communities expanded and became more settled, they were gradually able to have more leisure time. The book begins with a general history of the American colonies, briefly explaining the range of countries the early colonists came from, the effect their arrival had on Native Americans, and the role that indentured servants played in society and the adoption of slavery as a means of obtaining workers.
I was glad that they brought up the point about indentured servitude and slavery because I remember discussing it in my college history courses. Indentured servants were people who would agree to work for someone for a period of time in return for having that person pay for their passage to the colonies. There was a benefit for both sides in indentured servitude. For the indentured servants, they used their labor as a means to pay for transportation to the colonies that they could not have afforded by themselves, and once they had worked for the required period, they would be free to establish themselves independently in the colonies. For those who paid for the indentured servants, they would have guaranteed workers for the period of the indenture. However, plantation owners and other employers soon realized that they were not finding as many indentured servants as they wanted, and they didn’t like losing their labor force when their terms of indenture ended the workers left their employ. Therefore, they began to turn to slavery as a means of gaining a steady stream of workers who could not say no to them, no matter what the working conditions were like, and could never leave. Slavery wasn’t so much about race in the beginning as economics and employers who wanted cheap, permanent labor and didn’t care how they got it or what it would mean to the people they bought. But, I have other books that say more about what that led to. This book is mostly about lighter subjects, but it does acknowledge the serious aspects of American history and also makes the point that these completely unwilling immigrants also became a part of American society and, like other groups who came to America willingly, also brought traditions and folklore of their own that would gradually become part of American society, entertainment, and celebrations.
During the Colonial period, celebrations and entertainment varied throughout the regions of the American colonies, depending on the mixture of colonists living there and the holidays and traditions they brought with them from their homelands. Some of their holidays were ones that we still celebrate today, while others have fallen out of favor.
The book is divided into chapters based on different aspects of entertainment, and I’ve given a brief description of each, although all of these sections have more detail than I’ve provided. I particularly recommend reading the book if you would like more information about Native American entertainment or the lives of slaves because there is more information about these topics than I’ve described.
The chapters are:
Winter and Spring Holidays
Christmas seems like one of the most obvious holidays for colonists to celebrate, but it wasn’t so straight-forward. First, not all of the colonists were Christian (there were some Jewish people in parts of the colonies, and they celebrated Hanukkah in the winter), and even among those who were Christian, not all actually celebrated Christmas. The Puritans, who wanted to separate themselves as much as possible from traditions which they thought were not part of pure Christianity, did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, they didn’t celebrate many holidays or special days at all. Apart from the Sabbath, they only had a Day of Humiliation and Fasting and a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise, and those were not regularly scheduled events to be held on any specific date; they were only declared when it seemed that circumstances called for them. A Day of Humiliation and Fasting would happen at a time when things were going badly and the community was suffering, and the Puritans would use that day for prayer, reflection on their sins, and repentance. A Day of Thanksgiving and Praise would happen when the community was prosperous and felt blessed, and it was a time of prayer and feasting.
Also, among the Christians who did celebrate Christmas, not all of them celebrated it on the same day, and different groups had different customs for Christmas, depending on where they were originally from. People from Sweden celebrated St. Lucia Day on December 13th, and people from the Netherlands celebrated Sinterklaas Eve and Day on December 5th and 6th. It was also common for Christmas celebrations to continue through the Twelfth Night from Christmas itself, January 6th, also call Epiphany (the day that the Wise Men visited Jesus).
Easter is a common Spring holiday in modern times, but in Colonial times, it wasn’t so widely or elaborately celebrated. Colonial children were not told stories about an “Easter Bunny” delivering eggs or candy, although colonists from the Netherlands did decorate eggs with natural dyes and scratched designs into the shells.
A spring holiday that many of the colonists celebrated (but not the Puritans) but few people celebrate in modern America was May Day. On May 1st, people would gather flowers and dance around a Maypole.
Summer and Fall Holidays
The Fourth of July is the essential summer holiday of modern America, but it didn’t exist until the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Many people’s lives centered around agriculture in colonial times, so fall was harvest time for them. Some colonists (although, not all, and definitely not the Puritans) also celebrated Halloween. The holiday was particularly celebrated in communities where there were people of Irish descent. (This book doesn’t say so, but at this time, it was particularly a Catholic holiday, the eve before All Saints’ Day on November 1st, although some other Christians celebrated it, too. Some Protestant groups, especially the Puritans, shunned the holiday as being too Catholic. I covered the general history of Halloween in more detail on my site of Halloween Ideas, including how Halloween became a secular American holiday.)
In some areas, colonists celebrated an anti-Catholic holiday called Pope’s Day on the 5th of November, where they would burn effigies of the pope. This was an older holiday than the English Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated on the same day, and that holiday was also celebrated in the parts of the colonies with English influence.
Of course, both colonists and Native Americans had harvest celebrations in the fall, including the periodic Thanksgiving feasts that led to our modern Thanksgiving holiday.
Sports and Recreation
Much of the lives of the early colonists focused on basic survival and the establishment of their new communities. (The book explains some of the ways Native Americans helped the early colonists to survive and adapt to their new environment and to unfamiliar foods.) There was always work to be done, and even young children had to help with daily chores. Still, they found ways to enjoy themselves. Hunting expeditions were a kind of adventure, and children were often assigned the fun chore of picking berries.
Then they had leisure time, they would enjoy games like shovelboard (like shuffleboard but played on long tables), ninepins or bowling (done at first outside on the village green), and billiards (some of the more prosperous families had their own billiard tables). In the 17th century, ninepins was the primary form of bowling with pins instead of our modern ten-pin games. Ninepins, also called Skittle, was the game that Rip Van Winkle played in the story set during this time by Washington Irving. When they talked about just “bowling”, they didn’t use pins at all, instead rolling a ball toward a designated mark on the ground. Boys played stick-and-ball types of games, like stool ball. Even Colonial women enjoyed a game of stool ball. Other games and sports Colonial people enjoyed include quoits (a ring toss game), tennis, battledores, swimming, canoe races, foot races, wrestling, and horse races. Wealthy families even engaged in fencing and (believe it or not) jousting.
During the winter, children built snow forts and had snowball fights and went sledding. Both adults and children went ice skating.
Games and Toys
Many Colonial children’s toys were homemade. It was common for boys to whittle wooden toys for themselves such as whistles and windmills. Boys also had toy guns and bows and arrows. Colonial children liked to roll hoops, either homemade wooden ones or metal hoops from an old barrel. They rolled the hoops upright along the ground using a stick to keep them going, and the object was to go as fast as possible without loosing control of the hoop or having it fall. (They did not use hoops as hula hoops.) Native Americans also played with hoops, and they liked to make it a challenge to throw a spear through a moving hoop. In modern times, jump rope is often considered a girl’s game, but in Colonial times, it was more popular with boys, and they had their own jump rope rhymes. Colonial children also played with spinning tops, marbles (Native Americans had their own traditional marble games as well), jackstones (a precursor to modern Jacks), kites, toy boats, balls, and swings. Girls had dolls (usually homemade and sometimes corn husk dolls at harvest time and paper dolls they made themselves), and some of the more fortunate girls had doll cradles and dollhouses with furniture. Many homemade toys were actually very durable and were passed on through families for generations.
Children also played many games that are still popular on modern playgrounds, including various forms of tag, counting-out rhymes (like the kind modern children use to choose who is going to be “it” in a game), hide and seek, blindman’s buff, leapfrog, cat’s cradle, and hopscotch (which they called “scotch hoppers”). Sometimes, they played board games, like Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, and Nine Men’s Morris.
People throughout the colonies played various types of dice, domino, and card games, some of which were gambling games. Gambling rules and taboos differed throughout the colonies, but in some areas, even children were allowed to gamble.
Social Amusements
A primary form of entertainment in Colonial times was visiting friends and neighbors, and they developed a form of social etiquette around visiting. Some people had specific days when they were expected at friends’ homes, and people often left calling cards to show that they had visited. (Since people couldn’t phone someone to say that they were coming to visit, they either had to prearrange the visit ahead of time to ensure that they were expected or leave a calling card if the person they were visiting happened to not be home, so they would know that a friend stopped by and wanted to talk to them.) Women who lived in towns held tea parties, and pioneer families had picnics that included fishing and berry-picking.
There were seasonal fairs in spring and fall with entertainment like juggling, puppet shows, tightrope walking, fortune-telling, music, exotic animal shows, and various types of contests. The fairs were also part business and involved trading and selling various types of products.
Colonists’ social lives also included political and religious community meetings. Towns would hold meetings to discuss town business and issues of local concern. Election days for public offices often had an air of public celebration as people watched public speeches and debates and booths sold good things to eat to the spectators. Citizens were welcome to attend criminal court trials and witness public punishments designed to humiliate offenders. Communities held market days when farmers, businessmen, and even Native Americans could gather to buy, sell, and trade products.
Church attendance and activities varied by denomination and geographical location. In some areas, church attendance was mandatory, and people would not engage in any other business or activity on Sunday. In areas where neighbors didn’t live close to each other, church was one of their main opportunities to see each other, and it was common for families to meet and share meals after church or for young men to visit with girls they liked.
Taverns, inns, and coffee houses also became important community meeting places. They could be uses as places for community meetings, political discussions, arranging business deals, distributing news and mail, and (as a later chapter explains) sometimes theatrical performances.
Entertainment and Pastimes
Because Colonial life was often hard and full of work, learning how to entertain yourself at home and keep yourself amused while performing chores were important. Work and entertainment often went hand-in-hand, and social occasions were often accompanied by chores and activities to keep the hands busy. Children started learning useful skills early in life. By the age of five years old, girls were able to sew. They also learned knitting, weaving, and embroidery, showing off the range and variety of stitches they knew in hand-sewn samplers. (Originally, samplers were meant to be exactly that – samples of the variety of sewing stitches a girl knew how to do. They were meant to be a demonstration of learning and accomplishment. They were very different from modern samplers that only contain one stitch – cross stitch.) Girls as well as boys knew how to whittle wood, and it was common for children to trade things they had made themselves for other things they wanted. Families had gardens where they grew vegetables, herbs, and flowers that the family could enjoy, and some women developed side businesses selling vegetable and flower seeds from the family garden.
While not everyone knew how to read, many people did, and they would read books like the Bible, works by Shakespeare, and books of poetry. Some people even wrote poetry for fun. Benjamin Franklin opened the first lending library in Philadelphia in 1731. Families often provided their own entertainment in the evening, telling stories and folktales around the fire.
Communities also had musical performances and public dances. Different colonies had different customs regarding dancing, with some communities making it taboo for men and women to dance together. Wealthy plantation owners held fancy formal balls. Music was a common part of children’s education because people who knew how to sing or play an instrument could help entertain their families at home. Some people simply used improvised instruments made out of various objects that they happened to have on hand, like a comb covered in paper, spoons, or tin kettles.
Early American Observances
Aside from the holidays described earlier, there were other special occasions that communities celebrated. Families gathered to celebrate births, baptisms, and weddings. Even funerals, while being a time of mourning, were also social gatherings. Sometimes, wealthy families would give little gifts to those who attended family funerals.
Some children had birthday parties. In the early days of the colonies, people were too occupied with the business of survival to bother much with remembering birthdays, but as communities became more settled and stable, birthdays were increasingly celebrated, especially among the more prosperous families. Sometimes, children were excused from chores on their birthday, and they were often given practical gifts.
Native American groups also had their own seasonal festivals and ceremonies of thanksgiving that varied among tribes. These seasonal festivals marked times for planting or harvesting crops or moving to seasonal quarters. They would also have ceremonies to mark special life events, like testing boys to see if they were ready to be men in their communities.
Working Bees
As I said, work and fun often went hand-in-hand in Colonial America, and sometimes, the colonists would hold special working parties called “bees.” When people got together in big groups to take care of major chores, the work got done faster, and they could have fun talking and visiting with each other while they did it. When they finished with whatever task they set out to do, they would finish the event with food, games, and other fun activities.
At harvest time, they would hold harvest parties to harvest food and prepare it for storage. At apple bees (the parties, not the restaurant), people would peel and core apples and make apple-based foods, like cider and applesauce. At husking bees, they would husk corn. There was also an element of flirting to husking bees because, if a man found an ear of red corn, he was allowed to kiss a woman sitting near him.
At other times of the year, they would hold different types of bees for specific tasks or crafts. “Raising days” were when people got together to build a new building, like a house, barn, or public building, like a schoolhouse. Women held quilting bees and knitting bees. Children today still compete in spelling bees, just like colonial children did. “Sparking bees” were kind of like colonial singles meetups. Single young people in the community would come to the bee to meet each other, and if they found someone who “sparked” their interest, they could begin a formal courtship with that person.
Games, Goodies, Gifts
The final chapter of the book has words for the counting-out rhyme “Intry, Mintry” and the rules for the tag game Fox and Geese and the spinning top game Chipstones. There are recipes for Maple Sugar-on-Snow, Furmenty, Speculaas (a Dutch Christmas cookie), and Raspberry Flummery (a sweet drink). There are also instructions for making a pomander ball.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
The American Girl’s Handy Book by Lina Beard and Adelia B. Beard, 1887.
This is a Victorian activity book for girls, focusing particularly on outdoor seasonal activities and celebrations. Earlier, I covered The Girl’s Own Book, which is a similar type of Victorian activity book for girls, but there are important differences between the two. For one thing, they were published over 50 years apart, which means that the girls who read this book when it was new would likely be the granddaughters of girls who had grown up with The Girl’s Own Book. For another thing, this book is organized by the seasons and has a more outdoor focus. There is a reason for the somewhat different focus of this book, but I need to explain a little about the authors.
Lina Beard (“Lina” was short for Mary Caroline) and Adelia Beard were sisters. Their brother, Daniel Beard, was the author of The American Boy’s Handy Book, published a few years before The American Girl’s Handy Book. Like their brother did in his book, Lina and Adelia set out to make a book of activities specifically for an audience of American children, taking into account the sort of environment that the children would live in and the language they would use. In the preface to the book, they say that they had the idea to write a book of activities for girls after the publication of their brother’s book, thinking about times when they have heard girls wish for an activity book of their own whenever a new one for boys appeared. (There were previous activity/how-to books for girls, like The Girl’s Own Book, but their comments indicate that there were more books of this type for boys than for girls.)
Both Lina and Adelia would later be founding members of the Camp Fire Girls, the first major scouting organization for girls in America, during the 1910s, while Daniel Carter Beard was one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America. (Camp Fire Girls was founded before the founding of the Girl Scouts. Today, it is now a co-ed scouting organization simply called Camp Fire.) Their family believed in appreciating nature and the benefits of exercise and outdoor life, and these concepts are reflected in the activities in of the Handy Books.
However, even though they valued exercise and healthy outdoor activities for girls and the subtitle specifically mentions “outdoor fun”, this book has plenty of indoor activities for girls as well. This is probably partly because they would have appealed to girls of the period and their parents, but it’s also because the book takes the realities of weather into account. An ideal time for forming walking clubs and enjoying the beauties of nature would have been in the spring, but not so much in the heat of summer, when making fans and playing relatively sedentary games would have helped keep them cool, and not in the winter, when things were covered in snow and girls would have to take their exercise indoors and work on indoor crafts and needlework. Overall, the The American Boy’s Handy Book has more outdoor activities than The American Girl’s Handy Book, but the Beard sisters also wrote other activity books, some of which have even more of an outdoor or camping focus.
Contents of the Book
The activities in this book are organized by season, and I liked the organization much better than the organization in The Girl’s Own Book. The organization by season is the same as in The American Boy’s Handy Book. Within each section, there are more specialized sections, focusing on particular pastimes and holidays in each season.
Spring
The holidays that appear in this section are April Fool’s Day, Easter, and May Day. May Day isn’t a major holiday in modern times, but schools in the 19th century commonly had May Day celebrations.
The recommended outdoor activities for spring are lawn tennis (this section includes instructions for making your own lawn tennis net), forming a walking club, and picking and preserving wildflowers. The wildflowers section is the longest section in this part of the book, and it has a surprising array of methods for preserving wildflowers, including crystallizing them.
Summer
The holidays in this section are Midsummer Eve and the Fourth of July. Midsummer Eve isn’t a common holiday for modern girls to celebrate, but the Midsummer activities of the 19th century involve fortune telling.
Summer provides many opportunities for outdoor activities. There are tips for holding various types of picnics and decorating a seaside cottage, and there are suggestions for using plants in art and making dolls out of corn husks and flowers. However, summer is also very hot, and in the days before air conditioning, people would have also wanted ways to relax and keep themselves as cool as possible in the heat. The summer section of the book has instructions for making fans and hammocks and playing relatively quiet games.
Autumn
This section begins with suggestions for celebrating Halloween and ends with Thanksgiving. The Victorian era was the beginning of Halloween parties as we know them today. There would have been games for children and romantic divination games for young adults, particularly young women and girls.
The Thanksgiving section offers tips for putting on a kind of Thanksgiving play, but it’s not historically accurate by any means, and the American Indians aren’t portrayed well. The whole thing is more like a series of joke skits.
The nature themes in the Autumn section focus on nutting parties and making decorations from autumn foliage. A nutting party is a sort of walking party and picnic, where the girls enjoy the beauties of nature, gather chestnuts, and roast and eat the nuts afterward.
Most of the autumn activities focus on various types of art, including drawing, painting in oil and water colors, making picture frames, making clay and wax models, making plaster casts, and painting china.
I was fascinated by the arts and crafts information because I always enjoyed arts and crafts, but I’d like to draw your attention to one activity that doesn’t quite fit with the others in this section: making a tin-can telephone. This fascinates me because telephones were a relatively new invention at the time this book was written, but the tin can variety apparently weren’t far behind.
Winter
This section begins with Christmas activities and games and tips for making homemade presents. The other holiday celebrations included are New Year’s Eve, a special Leap Day party (for years with Leap Days), and Valentine’s Day.
Most of the activities in this section are indoor activities, like studying heraldry and making your own coat of arms with suggested symbols, doing needlework, making book covers and scrap books, and making things from stuff that otherwise would be thrown away. (They didn’t have the term upcycling back then, but that’s basically what this activity was about.) There are a couple of sections about decorating a room, decorating windows and mantle pieces and making and decorating furniture.
There is also a section with recipes for different types of candy.
For exercise, there is a section about doing indoor exercises. There is also a section about creating booths for a fair, which surprised me because I wouldn’t have thought of that as a winter activity. Then again, people can begin planning early for later events.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 