Two more days for Christmas! And did you check out our post on a splendid gift to give a child this season?
As well as reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol together for the first time, which we all greatly enjoyed, we have been reading other stories with a Christmas setting, including two multicultural versions of the Nativity story, the birth of Jesus. The first is The Road to Bethlehem: A Nativity Story from E
thiopia told by Elizabeth Laird (Collins, 1987). Elizabeth Laird has spent a lot of time in Ethiopia gathering stories from the oral tradition and her writing here certainly asks to be read aloud – not only is the story told simply with plenty of direct speech to bring it alive, but for those children who are familiar with the story from their own traditions, there is likely to be a good deal of intrigued discussion in which the differences are explored, including new characters and miracles.The second book is one I blogged about last year but didn’t actually manage to share with my boys – however, we have now read together Ian Wallace’s beautifully illustrated version of The Huron Carol (Groundwood, 2006), based on an English translation of the Christmas carol written by a French Jesuit missionary, Father Jean de Brébeuf, for the Huron people in the 1600s. After reading through the first verse together line by line with its double-page-spread illustration, showing the people, landscapes and fauna of its Canadian roots, we have really enjoyed singing the whole carol from the music and words given at the end – in the original Huron, in French and in English.
