Kids Holiday Craft Workshops in the Creativity Lab
Kids, have your grownups told you the best gifts are something you make? Need ideas and material? Come to the library! Grownups can be asked to stay out of sight!
Grades 1-5 Dec. 3, 2-3 p.m., Painted ornaments.
Grades 6-8 Dec. 10, 2-3 p.m. Glass ornaments.
Grades 7 and up Dec. 17, 2-3 p.m. Necklaces, rings and earrings.
Call or email the library to register.
FREE COVID BOOSTER SHOTS
The booster van is coming! Next door at the First United Congregational Church, 19 N. Wilmot Rd., Wednesday, Dec. 14, 1-4 p.m. Some children's shots will be available. No appointment necessary, walk-ins welcome.
Book Clubs
The Tuesday evening book club will meet at the library Dec. 20, 7:15 p.m. for a fun gift exchange and a discussion of "Seasons at Eagle Pond" by Donald Hall.
The Wilmot Historical Society book club is reading "Six Frigates; The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy" by Ian W. Toll. For more information, contact Marc Davis at marcsdavis@tds.net.
From the Director's Desk
What makes a great children's book? A lot of the most popular ones seem to be written for the adults reading them (and publishing and promoting them) but not necessarily for children. Could it be that the most apparently simple art forms are the most difficult ones to pull off? Like poetry, children's books are the art of saying much in very few words.
There was an interesting essay in the January 2022 New Yorker about Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. Writer Anna Holmes describes Brown as "a seductive iconoclast with a Katharine Hepburn mane and a penchant for ignoring the rules." Before Brown's time, children's books generally had a beginning, middle, and an end -- and a moral! But Brown and scholar Lucy Sprague Mitchell envisioned children's books that met children on their own level, exploring the world in a way children, but not necessarily adults, would enjoy.
Goodnight Moon broke the mold by having no discernible plot and by using Fauvist painter Clement Hurd for the illustrations; Brown and Mitchell's believed children more were interested in colors, sensations, the sounds and feelings of language, than in finding out what happens.
This makes sense if you've ever read a child the same story over and over! Children get favorite books that they love to have read to them, sometimes long after the reading adult is bored out of her skull. But the world is new for the very young, who are growing by quarter-inches in their sleep, not to mention making, losing and adapting neurons at a rate adults can hardly fathom. Each reading of a favorite book is separated from the last time by a much longer time, comparatively, for the child than it is for the adults -- as if adults were aging by dog years, and the children by elephant years. Life goes by so much quicker for the elders!
Thus, The Snowy Day is the all-time most-checked-out book in the NY Public Library system. It's simple and beautiful, and to read it is to connect with your own inner child's wonder at making footprints in the snow, at snowballs melting in the house, at feelings of tiredness and safety in a hot bath. But there's no plot, no tension. Just things that happen.
Mary Lyn Ray's Vroom, Vroom! is another great example. Color, and noise, and entertaining pictures to look at -- it's no wonder this a certain person's grandchild's favorite book.
What was your favorite children's book? As a child? As a parent? My holiday wish for anyone reading this is that you get to read to a beloved child this December.
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