“Long and long the story has been told . . .”

It’s the Christmas story, so, of course, it’s been told before.  Again and again.  For more than two thousand years. 

Not the one about Santa and reindeer, sleighs and gifts, chimneys and elves that so inhabits our culture.  Most of us have very individual memories of that.  Here is one of mine: 

Christmas Eve.  Just before bedtime.  Daddy announces, “I’m going down to stoke the furnace.”  And he goes.  I’m horrified.  The furnace!  The place Santa will soon arrive!  (There being no fireplace in our four-room mill house, how else will he get in?)  I don’t remember the words my mother used to soothe me, but I remember the quiet lilt of her voice.  And I remember, too, that Santa came through unharmed.

This, though, is the other story, the one beneath every Christmas story. 

“Of a young woman, her husband, a donkey . . .”

How to tell that again?

“Long and long the story has been . . .”

The one even very young children know by heart. 

“Long and long the story . . .”

How to make it fresh?

So I seek out another story that grew out of it, this one old, too.  Of the animals waking to speak at midnight on Christmas Eve.  On that first Christmas Eve and on every Christmas Eve after. 

“He is here!”

Yet the question remains.  How to take those two ancient stories, so familiar, so unchanging, and make them new?

To bring them into the “now and now”?

So I gathered the fewest possible words, just enough to set off the story already living in our hearts.  And I began.

Whatever the topic, picture books are—must be—simplicity itself.  Despite that essential simplicity, sometimes a picture book requires deep research to pull a single thread from a complex weave and carry it forward.  The Stuff of Stars is such a book.  This one began with simplicity itself.  And took the shortest possible route.  Nothing to be parsed or sorted.  Only our story-memories are to be tickled into life.

“Forever and forever, the story shall be . . .

sung in treetops,

whispered in woods,

bayed in yards,

purred on pillows . . .

and repeated in

home after home after home

by every one of God’s creatures.”

 

Today is publication day for The Animals Speak,

my newest picture book.

Illustrated in vibrate color by Brittany Baugus.

Published by Beaming Press.

 

“‘The Child is here!

Rejoice!’”