A progressive Christian curriculum that links meaningful children's books with sacred and spiritual teachings
A boy is learning his father’s craft: recognizing the trees that release valuable resin – myrrh – and gathering the round drops, which look almost like tears. One day the two find a “tear’ of unusual size and, in the marketplace, three foreign strangers are interested in purchasing it as a gift for a baby. Clarion Books, 2011.
It is the day before Christmas in a small Russian village. Alexi’s babushka is telling him what Christmas was like when she was a girl – before the soldiers came. Alexi has many questions, including, “Why can’t we celebrate Christmas tomorrow in St. Nicholas?” Babushka sadly replies that it would take a miracle after sixty years. Alexi thinks that if there truly was such a thing as a miracle, why couldn’t it happen here? And so unfolds a story that reveals how, though quiet and hidden, faith and hope cannot be suppressed by soldiers or by time. The Miracle of Saint Nicholas (1997).
It may be Christmastime but on a small, forlorn farm the holiday season is best forgotten, along with painful memories of loved ones lost. Mother Nature has other plans, however, and a chance snowstorm brings together two unlikely hearts, one human and one beast, yet both yearning for comfort, companionship, and that most elusive gift of all, hope. Sleeping Bear Press (2004).
This is a moving story of the power of the simple gift of love, written by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth).
On Christmas Eve, a man recalls the holiday many years ago when he gave his father, a struggling farmer, a most-appreciated gift: the boy rose extra early to do his father’s biggest chore, the milking. Buehner’s inky, starlit winter skies and rustic barn revealed by lantern light transport readers to a hushed and humble setting, reminiscent of the manger. HarperCollins (2002).
It’s clear that the narrator holds a bitter grudge as s/he sends an enemy crude and discarded gifts over the course of the “twelve nights of Christmas.” What the narrator’s enemy decides to do with each of these gifts is nothing less than a Christmas miracle, touching on themes of forgiveness and redemption and the hope of a new beginning that the Christmas story promises. Shadow Mountain (2015).
