ONCE UPON A CHRISTMAS TIME
By
The author of Papa's Wife and successive volumes about her pastor father's family looks back down the years to the time when she celebrated the Christmas season with her Papa, Mama, seven brothers and sisters, and friends in Sweden. The holiday began with the Festival of Lights of December thirteenth and ended with Epiphany on the sixth of January. Between times, there came the Christmas baking and cleaning, the demise and preparation of the Christmas Pig, the buying of small gifts at the variety store; Christmas Eve with the traditional smorgasbord; Christmas and the church service at dawn followed some days later by the boisterous ceremony of robbing the Christmas tree. Rather a remove from the experience, yet a warm if standard recollection of Christmas in another land.