THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 4, 1994 TAG: 9412050222
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, Christmas in America came without credit cards.
It came without shopper's cable. It came without television commercials. It came without television, period.
Or radio.
Such a noninstant, unplugged, pre-Nintendo era is celebrated in Lucy's Christmas, ruggedly written by Donald Hall and luminously illustrated by Michael McCurdy (Harcourt Brace, 40 pp., $14.95); both creators bring the bold beauty of woodcuts to their work.
This is a children's book to be read aloud by a fire - or, better, in bed, as chilly winds make winter eaves creak and imagination pulls the urban curtain from our rural past.
Lucy's Christmas takes place in and around Danbury, N.H., 84 years ago. It recounts careful preparations made long in advance for a meaningful holiday: hand-crafted presents, like pincushions and pen wipers; culinary labors of love, like applesauce vinegar, baked beans and brown bread. And it shares the excitement of arrival by steam locomotive - all the way from Chicago - of a brand-new, Sears Roebuck, Glenwood Kitchen Range.
The beautiful new Glenwood was huge, black and cast-iron, with bright nickel trim. It had its own reservoir, where the water stayed warm all day but never boiled away. It had levers all over, to control the heat so that everything cooked at the right temperature.
At the center of all this is wondering Lucy, earnest student at the one-room Eagle Pond School and member of the farmhouse family that buys its salt and coffee from a Grand Union man who stops by every Wednesday. We learn in an afterword that Lucy is Hall's mother, now in her 90s, who told and retold these true stories of her own childhood to an attentive son. They were well-placed.
Donald Hall grew up, after Harvard and Oxford, to receive the Edna St. Vincent Millay Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Robert Frost Medal and the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, among other honors. As an accomplished prosodist, he understands the concrete economy of rigorous language; as a longtime grandparent, he also understands the wild impressionability of young people. Hall received a Caldecott Award for his 1979 kids' book, The Ox-Cart Man.
This is the same person who provided Writing Well, which sold more than 400,000 copies.
He can put us in the past:
At Henry's store they bought tiny sticky-backed calendars, three for a nickel. They also bought two yards of pink netting and strips of colored paper with stickum at one end. From the paper strips, the girls glued red and green chains to hang from wall to wall across the church. Then Lucy helped Caroline draw cat pictures on two pieces of white cardboard and stick the calendars underneath them.
``Imagine!'' said Lucy to Caroline. ``It's going to be 1910!''
Hall and his wife, Jane Kenyon, live in the sprawling frame house depicted in this book. In 1975 he left a 17-year tenured professorship at the University of Michigan to devote all of his time to writing on Eagle Pond, formerly his grandparents' New Hampshire farm. The world kept in touch; so much so, the U.S. Postal Service soon conferred upon him his own personal ZIP code, 03230-9599.
Michael McCurdy, a wood engraver for 30 years, has also been a publisher and printer. He is a New Englander, too, residing in Great Barrington, Mass. In preparation for illustrating Lucy's Christmas, he corresponded with Lucy Hall and spent time at the family home.
So we have Donald Hall's ear and Michael McCurdy's eye.
Lucy's Christmas may be a children's story, but it is an adult's gift. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: MICHAEL MCCURDY
Woodcut illustrations bring a sense of history to ``Lucy's
Christmas.''
by CNB