MEDIUM RARE

My all-time favorite Christmas book, published in the last year of the last century, 1999, is The Twelve Teas of Christmas.

Not that I’m that deep into tea, but because it’s a charming book with pretty illustrations and notes on decorating, gift-making and giving, with a table of contents that reads like the following: A Celebration of Friendship, A Celebration of Family, A Celebration of Joy, and so on. For the last two weeks, looking around a few bookstores, I was disappointed that there are no longer Christmasy books written and published like this one by Millie Barnes, with paintings by Sandy Lyman Clough. What’s Christmas without a book to read and hug at bedtime?

While tea recipes are the raison d’etre for this product of Harvest House Publishers of Eugene, Oregon, USA, there is so much more to relish and like between the pages (96 in all). For starters, did you know that the word Christmas was derived from the Latin “Christes Masse” which grew out of the Roman Catholic feast day by that name, Christ’s Mass, in approximately AD 100.

Centuries later, in 1510, a decorated Christmas tree was displayed in Riga, Latvia. After a hundred years, in 1610, tinsel was invented in Germany, where Martin Luther was born. The same Luther who was credited for fashioning the first lighted Christmas tree. According to legend, he was walking home in the wintry cold one night when he picked up a fallen branch from a tree and took it home with him. The branch was too handsome to be useless, so he placed it on the table and then, inspired by its beauty, the family lighted candles around it. Voila, the first illuminated Christmas tree.

Pine trees, fir trees, we don’t have them in this tropical country, which hasn’t stopped us from making them, artfully, artificially, at Christmas time. I’ve seen artisans creating a tree out of bottle brushes! As for this newspaper’s tree-making contest, anything goes – with newsprint.

My best friend, who’s now in a haven of eternal Christmases, preferred several miniature trees over one big one in her apartment; ergo, four or five miniature trees lovingly distributed throughout the house. As she would’ve put it, Christmas is in the air!