Nancy Keane's Booktalks -- Quick and Simple
 
Kinsey-Warnock,Natalie.
A CHRISTMAS LIKE HELEN’S
New York : Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004
IL K-3, RL 6.4
ISBN 0618231374
Click on the book to read Amazon reviews
How do you think the celebration of Christmas might have been different for your grandparents?  How about your great-grandparents?  How would the holidays be different if you didn’t have basic modern conveniences such as electricity, running water, cars, or telephones?  Now imagine that you live on a farm in Vermont 100 years ago.  Although there are two or three feet of snow on the ground, horses have to be fed, cows need to be milked, and you must walk to school, even when the temperature drops below zero.  This is what life was like for Helen.  Her family grows their own food, cuts ice from the frozen pond, and taps the sap from the maple trees to make their own sweet syrup.  When it’s time for Christmas, Helen and her family enjoy many of the same activities children participate in today…. singing Christmas carols, playing with family and friends, and going to church.  This story tells of all the things Helen experienced as a child long ago.  One cold Christmas Eve her father carried her out to the barn in the middle of the night to see the arrival of a very special gift.  Helen realizes that nothing could be better for her than to grow up on that cold Vermont farm in the early 1900s.  To have A CHRISTMAS LIKE HELEN’S you must read this book. (SCASL Picture Book Awards)
SUBJECTS:     Christmas -- Fiction.
                        Farm life -- Vermont -- Fiction.
                        Vermont -- History -- 20th century -- Fiction.
                        Christmas stories.
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