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readallthenewberys2013-02-25 05:30 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2013-02-25 05:30 am
Newbery Honor: Nicholas, A Manhattan Christmas Story (Annie Carroll Moore)
I have finally acquired for review one of the half-dozen Newbery Honor books not even my old home library had! ALL HAIL INTERLIBRARY LOAN. XD This would be one of the 1925 Newbery Honor Books - the year of Tales from Silver Lands. (I've also got the other Honor Book from that year on request, but it's not in yet.)
This is an extremely old book. I'm guessing it's been out of print for a while; the pages are brittle and brown, I'm going to have to be quite careful not to chip them.
It's also thick. From the name I expected a small book - Christmas stories tend to be short and sweet, usually picture-books - but it's a 331-page brick. O_O I have it out for less than three weeks, so here goes.
* The book's endpapers bear an artistic little map of Manhattan in four sections, from Battery Park at the bottom of the first to Van Cortland Park (up in the Bronx) at the top of the fourth. Between the repairs made with industrial-strength duct tape, the interlibrary loan banner hooked around the front cover, and the various necessary stickers indicating library possession, these are very largely obscured, and since they show detailed rivers, many landmarks, and barely any streets at all, they were probably never very useful.
* The library from which this volume came bought it in 1934. Wow.
* First line: "On a snowy Christmas Eve a Brownie was hiding in the Children's Room of the Public Library, waiting for something wonderful to happen." OKAY THEN. Kiddie fantasy? Is the brownie waiting for anything specific, or just some wonderful thing? Are we going to use up New York's entire annual import of capital letters pretty soon? Let's find out! *g*
* It's a girl brownie. I know Brownies are a section of the Girl Scouts, but I don't think I've ever seen a girl brownie mentioned outside that context. Interesting.
* A Norwegian Troll (capitals original) is climbing down one of the branches of the... Fifth Avenue... Christmas Tree? I suspect very strongly that this book is going to be at least as unpredictable as The Old Tobacco Shop, though I pray it's less creeptastic! O_O
* Trolls are very shy. They're also lucky. And eat porridge with thick cream; apparently somebody has left it a bowl of this in Hudson Park, wherever that is.
* ...oh, I see, it's a Christmas tree in the window of the reading room which faces onto Fifth Avenue. That makes a tiny bit more sense.
* A strange boy about eight inches high, whose face "glowed like a Christmas fire", has just walked in through said Fifth Avenue window. By the way he's being described, he's a live doll or nutcracker-type critter? "His cheeks and lips and nose were bright red", and so forth.
* Um, this live doll is our titular Nicholas. I tentatively award this book the "weirdest Newbery liveblog of 2013" medal. (Old Tobacco Shop, of course, holds the 2012 title.)
* Nicholas has apparently just arrived on a ship. He tells us exactly how he got here from the Battery, which El stations and everything. He "asked a policeman the nearest way to Christmas in New York" and was sent to the Children's Library, because New York policemen are completely unfazed by eight-inch-tall dolls asking unanswerable questions. ;-)
* The troll knew Nicholas would be coming and left the window unfastened. What.
* The brownie hosts a party in the reading room on Christmas Eve, inviting all the various sorts of fairyland denizens she knows, all the animals that talk or sing (which somehow includes white bears and black cats), and all the storybook people. Nicholas can come if he's there by the stroke of midnight, which suggests to me that the narrative tension of the book will be Nicholas nearly being late and making it just in time. O_O
* AHAHAHAHA Nicholas asks if he may look at the books and see who will be at the party, and the brownie says he must put them back in the right places, then "I've given every one a number and they hate losing their places and getting lost" - I'm googling this author. Librarian y/n? XD
* Librarian starting in 1896(!) and founder of the first-ever children's room at a library. :D Ma'am, I don't know if your book is any good, but you yourself deserve a monument somewhere. *tips hat*
* She also founded the NYC library children's room where this chapter is set, so this all makes a lot more sense now. :D
* Heehee, Nicholas is writing down the titles of some specific books he hasn't seen before and wants to read; I recognize The Magic Fishbone, my family had an edition of it illustrated by Hilary Knight (best known as the illustrator of the Eloise books). I've never heard of Perez the Mouse or The Short History of Discovery. LIBRARIANS, THOUGH. ;-)
* Okay, that ended Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, Nicholas and the brownie are heading over to "Lucky's" to get a bite to eat. They talk about bits of New York in so much referential detail that I think I'd enjoy this book a lot better if I were actually there, and in fact I think it must be designed for kids to go around New York City seeing the then-current sights - between the Table of Contents listing different areas of the city for each chapter head, and lines like "Do be careful crossing Fortieth Street," cautioned the Brownie, "it is getting almost as busy as Forty-Second Street and there's no policeman." If that's so, I'm kind of interested to note that in 1925 the Newberys (in their fourth year) were still so small or so not-influential as to put such an extremely local book on the list.
* Huh, Lucky is a lady too! I don't know if she's a fairy or what - is she Lady Luck, the anthropomorphic personification? - but unless The Dream Coach turns out equally well-balanced, this is the only book on the list since the Newberys started that seems likely to have a diverse selection of female characters, and will be the only one till 1928's Downright Dencey (about a Quaker girl and her mother).
* I cannot for all my Googling find out who John Moon and Ann Caraway are, but they're friends of Lucky's whom Nicholas meets. John is about 21, Ann is "a lady of no particular age", which suggests to me she just might be nonfictional. ;-)
* Nicholas and John discuss World War I a little bit - this book is published in 1924 but must be set in the recent past, because John dropped out of college in his freshman year in order to help with the war effort (he drove trench munitions to the front, so that had to be during the actual war, right? Ah, Wiki tells me the battle he mentions was in 1917), and Nicholas wears a poilu's helmet which he picked up on the Chemin des Dames to remind himself that he wants to help child refugees in some way. Kind of pointed, but... showing a very thorough understanding of child psychology? This lady must have been an AMAZING children's librarian. :D
* The brownie goes off to tidy Lucky's kitchen as per her promise to the cook (oh right, she's a brownie! they tidy things!) and then prep for the night's party, and Nicholas and John go with Ann to look in the store windows on Fifth Avenue on their way to hear Christmas carols at Trinity, whatever Trinity is. End chapter two.
* Chapter 3 consists mostly of going to different shops, without enough detail for me to follow what's actually happening. I'm used to reading "virtual tours" of famous cities - they were extremely popular in the 1950s school readers my family had when I was growing up - but this is more of a straight-up tour guide, depending on the reader to actually be there and follow along in the city that's being talked about. So it's... not holding my interest very well. I can just about deduce that "the Favorite" is a store with fancy exhibits in the windows, but what on earth goes on with this in-joke about "looking in a Mirror" when you can't see the shop-windows of the Favorite through the crowds... I CAN'T EVEN. No explanation is offered, and the tone doesn't suggest that any will be; and ninety years past the time, I can't just ask a grown-up as I assume the kids were supposed to.
* There's a remarkably detailed description of the AWESOME NEW TRAFFIC SIGNAL LIGHTS at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, though. They're so enthusiastic about it! ;-) And it's very interesting: green means go for the north-south traffic, red means everybody stop, but yellow means go for the east-west traffic. I guess they didn't have our directional lights yet.
* Nicholas and John go to look at a pet shop on Thirty-first and Fifth - you see what I mean about a tour guide? '"BIRDS and DOGS," shouted Nicholas in big gold letters, above the noise of the traffic at Thirty-first Street.' - while Ann runs on to a bookshop called Brentano's in order to buy Nicholas a Christmas present.
* Ann says "meet me in exactly five flashes", which perplexes me greatly until Nicholas and John cross the street "on the next flash", so... Ann is using changes of the traffic-lights as a way of counting time! Fascinating. I wonder if that was a fad when this book was being written?
* They see the Flatiron Building, then go into Madison Square Garden, where a fairy sings (in a rhymed couplet) that she's the last fairy there and she's lonely. Nicholas asks why she stays; apparently it's to keep the statues company - there seems to be one of the goddess Diana and one of Admiral Farragut - and also to try and "gather enough fairy light" for the big Christmas tree. She snarks really hard about the use of new electric lights in red and green (rather than candles? oh nostalgic snarkypants :P), saying "there is nothing magical about" them and that "it looks more like a rocket than a Christmas Tree". This all makes me lol, because the magic of Christmas trappings is simply in what you've grown up with; multicolored flashing Christmas lights are as much the magic of the season to me as actual candles were in times past. I'm sure people slightly older than me can get just as grumpy about mini-lights as I might about enclosed LED cords, or whatever the next thing is that's going to become mainstream decoration.
(And I mean, you can always mock. LED cords look exactly like neon signs, to the point that you could probably write Merry Christmas in your front yard with them. Mini-lights are so tiny they don't look like Proper Christmas Lights at all... and so forth. *g*)
* Apparently I have strong feelings about nostalgia. ANYWAY.
* Nicholas, Ann, and John now take a "car" - I think it's a trolley-car of some sort, as it has a conductor and tickets - to the church where Ann wants to hear carols sung, Trinity Church.
* Oh, wow! That's right at the end of Wall Street, opposite Zucotti Park, and a couple blocks south of the World Trade Center site. It's one of those little churches surrounded by tall buildings, that are such a classically New York visual.
* So there's a brief Christmas Eve church service, denomination not specified, and then a Living Nativity scene in the vestibule of the church, between the inner and outer front doors; the church is full of hundreds of children, and they all walk round the church in a procession singing Christmas carols till everyone has had a chance to see the Nativity scene. ...oh, wow, "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was a brand-new hymn when this was written! O_O I didn't realize it was by the same Phillips Brooks as "Everywhere, everywhere, Christmas tonight"; it's a lot more standard poetry form.
* World War I was only six years past, at the time this was published, and it's everywhere in this book; Ann recalls Fifth Avenue being blocked off and people dancing in the streets (for False Armistice Day? I have the very faintest recollection of hearing about this), and the service flag with blue and gold memorial stars is still up in Trinity Church.
* In the next chapter, they head down toward the Battery, and we hear a long, long story about somebody called Oloffe von Kortlandt whom Washington Irving has apparently written about who was also historical? I don't know. We had a book of Washington Irving stories when I was little but I never got through any except Rip van Winkle and The Headless Horseman. They were all terribly slow, I thought. Anyway, this Oloffe fellow sails right round Manhattan Island on a dream from St Nicholas and gets shipwrecked, and blames the porpoises, and on the way back home stops at the southern tip of Manhattan and eats oysters and has another dream which convinces him to move his colony to Manhattan from the Jersey shore? And they "buy" the island from the natives (there is of course no questioning at all of any of the ethics of this, it's just How We Came To Be Here Because New York Is Awesome, very "beautiful old stories" in tone, very... settled acceptance of the course of history-as-told-by-white-people), and move the colony, celebration celebration memorial-chapel-right-here-in-Bowling-Green-Park the end.
* HAHAHAHAHA apparently the story was told here in straight-up Washington Irving's own words for the most part? John Moon explains that he liked it so well as a boy he's remembered most of it verbatim. Which, y'know, is something that actually happens, but I'm very amused by how casually it's just happened in a book with no worries about copyright or anything. (I mean, the publishing house - GP Putnam's Sons - actually has "The Knickerbocker Press" under their name in the front of the book, so they may well own the Washington Irving "Knickerbocker Stories" copyright, or else copyright laws just weren't what they are now. I don't know.)
* Now they walk through Battery Park and talk about the history of Castle Clinton, Castle Garden, or the West Battery, the round building after which Battery Park is named. At publication, it was a public aquarium; before that, it had been a concert hall; the writer skips over the half-century in between when it was the Emigrant Landing Depot, before Ellis Island opened. Immigration isn't one of "our beautiful old stories" - sorry, it's very neatly handled, I'm just feeling snarky.
* Anyway, that ends Chapter 5, and Chapter 6 consists of more shopping. It's only about five pages - a flower shop, an Italian pastry place, and another bus. I realize this must have been very interesting to kids who lived in New York when it was current and could actually follow the directions given, but I did not sign up for this to read a ninety-year-old tour pamphlet! O_O
* Chapter 7, yet more shopping. "The Mirror" turns out to be a large sweetshop, and "The Favorite" is... Woolworth's? "All the presents at the Favorite cost either five cents or ten cents". Good grief - I have to admit, the time-capsule aspects of this book are really interesting. Not the existence of a five-and-ten, I knew about those, but the fact that this book was printed when some of these things weren't even household words yet. :-)
* They put all the Christmas presents in a taxi and ride down to drop John Moon off at Penn Station, which is still "the Pennsylvania Station". Then they see the Post Office, and "the Night Before Christmas Country" (I have no idea what the author is talking about here), and do some more shopping.
* Ann Caraway has a nephew Joe Star, down from Maine. The Brownie has sent over a hamper of Christmas goodies for him and Nicholas, and the three of them have a very detailed supper together.
* Oh, here is the explanation of the "Night Before Christmas Country". Apparently they're near the region where the poem "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" (actual title: "A Visit from St Nicholas") was written. Ann Caraway reads us the first dozen lines or so, and Joe Star explains the whole story of its writing; I don't know if it's the true story or not, as it sounds rather like those poetical stories about the writing of the lyrics to Silent Night which are so much less interesting than the ACTUAL story about the music, with the mice.
* Nicholas goes to bed while Ann and Joe go to hear more carols sung at a different church, and this ends Chapter 7.
* Santa Claus wakes Nicholas up and takes him to... Washington Irving's house? And there are a lot of words without much substance, but they watch together as "the Knickerbockers", who are (I gather from context) the founders of New Amsterdam about whom Washington Irving wrote some stories I haven't read, troop down... the sides of the Kaatskills? Somewhere, I am not following this, I need more location data! O_O Anyway, and Nicholas and W.I. go to intercept them, end of chapter.
* We cut back to the Brownie, prepping for her big party at the Library. She talks to the two stone Lions who sit at the front doors, and they suggest... a super-big party? Because Nicholas. So the Brownie is like "omg I must do ALL the preparations!" and gets very hustled.
* I do not know who this Boy Wizard is who's being a central figure of the preparations. I can't tell if he's a fictional character I should recognize, or somebody like the two Lions and little Lucie Lenox (who is clearly a statue) from the real NY Public Library, or just a random wizard like our random brownie.
* Most of the rest of the chapter is about the specifics of how the Library is to be magically rearranged for the party, which walls to take out and so forth. Mary Mapes Dodge shows up, out of the pages of a children's periodical she wrote for? And now I am very confused, because everyone is going on about how long it's been since they had a party, like basically never, and I thought the Brownie gave one every year. Maybe that's just for the Children's Room people, but these all seem to be the Children's Room people. *frowns*
* AHAHAHAHA the animals are going to have a circus and an exhibition, and the cows of the Knickerbockers are going to do a piece on City Planning, because of how "they laid out all the streets in the lower part of Manhattan on their way to pasture." BRB LOLING FOREVER. :D
* Yeah, I am utterly confused now: there is a painting on the wall called "The Duchess" who is complaining about not being invited to help with the party (this part does not confuse me *g*), and the Brownie tells her to take over the Children's Room and throw whatever kind of party she wants in it, because "we've made no plans for it tonight". I thought the centerpiece of the Christmas party was the Children's Room! I don't know. O_O
* The Duchess leads a cotillion of eighteenth-century people and then decides to join in the big party instead of throwing one of her own, and now it's almost midnight and Nicholas is providing Plot Tension by being absent, but we're only on page 100 of 331? I am seriously and completely confused. I might not finish this book.
* On flipping very quickly through the rest of the book, I see that Nicholas is staying in New York till the day before Easter, and is going to visit ALL THE FANTASY CRITTERS EVER. He's going to the pantomime and the circus, spending New Year's up in Maine with Ann Caraway and Joe Star, et cetera... and finally, Ann is going to sail to Europe with Nicholas in the last chapter! They promise to be back very soon, with new book recommendations, because librarian. XD
I'm not going to read all the rest of this. I gave it a fair shot, 100 pages, and I see why not even my old library of completism owned it. It was a good book at the time and for the place it was written in, but it doesn't have much interest beyond that place and time.
I still would've voted to give it the Newbery above "Tales from Silver Lands" if it had had that absolute necessity of tour-books which are intended to replace rather than supplement a trip to the place: better visual descriptions, fewer El stops. :P
This is an extremely old book. I'm guessing it's been out of print for a while; the pages are brittle and brown, I'm going to have to be quite careful not to chip them.
It's also thick. From the name I expected a small book - Christmas stories tend to be short and sweet, usually picture-books - but it's a 331-page brick. O_O I have it out for less than three weeks, so here goes.
* The book's endpapers bear an artistic little map of Manhattan in four sections, from Battery Park at the bottom of the first to Van Cortland Park (up in the Bronx) at the top of the fourth. Between the repairs made with industrial-strength duct tape, the interlibrary loan banner hooked around the front cover, and the various necessary stickers indicating library possession, these are very largely obscured, and since they show detailed rivers, many landmarks, and barely any streets at all, they were probably never very useful.
* The library from which this volume came bought it in 1934. Wow.
* First line: "On a snowy Christmas Eve a Brownie was hiding in the Children's Room of the Public Library, waiting for something wonderful to happen." OKAY THEN. Kiddie fantasy? Is the brownie waiting for anything specific, or just some wonderful thing? Are we going to use up New York's entire annual import of capital letters pretty soon? Let's find out! *g*
* It's a girl brownie. I know Brownies are a section of the Girl Scouts, but I don't think I've ever seen a girl brownie mentioned outside that context. Interesting.
* A Norwegian Troll (capitals original) is climbing down one of the branches of the... Fifth Avenue... Christmas Tree? I suspect very strongly that this book is going to be at least as unpredictable as The Old Tobacco Shop, though I pray it's less creeptastic! O_O
* Trolls are very shy. They're also lucky. And eat porridge with thick cream; apparently somebody has left it a bowl of this in Hudson Park, wherever that is.
* ...oh, I see, it's a Christmas tree in the window of the reading room which faces onto Fifth Avenue. That makes a tiny bit more sense.
* A strange boy about eight inches high, whose face "glowed like a Christmas fire", has just walked in through said Fifth Avenue window. By the way he's being described, he's a live doll or nutcracker-type critter? "His cheeks and lips and nose were bright red", and so forth.
* Um, this live doll is our titular Nicholas. I tentatively award this book the "weirdest Newbery liveblog of 2013" medal. (Old Tobacco Shop, of course, holds the 2012 title.)
* Nicholas has apparently just arrived on a ship. He tells us exactly how he got here from the Battery, which El stations and everything. He "asked a policeman the nearest way to Christmas in New York" and was sent to the Children's Library, because New York policemen are completely unfazed by eight-inch-tall dolls asking unanswerable questions. ;-)
* The troll knew Nicholas would be coming and left the window unfastened. What.
* The brownie hosts a party in the reading room on Christmas Eve, inviting all the various sorts of fairyland denizens she knows, all the animals that talk or sing (which somehow includes white bears and black cats), and all the storybook people. Nicholas can come if he's there by the stroke of midnight, which suggests to me that the narrative tension of the book will be Nicholas nearly being late and making it just in time. O_O
* AHAHAHAHA Nicholas asks if he may look at the books and see who will be at the party, and the brownie says he must put them back in the right places, then "I've given every one a number and they hate losing their places and getting lost" - I'm googling this author. Librarian y/n? XD
* Librarian starting in 1896(!) and founder of the first-ever children's room at a library. :D Ma'am, I don't know if your book is any good, but you yourself deserve a monument somewhere. *tips hat*
* She also founded the NYC library children's room where this chapter is set, so this all makes a lot more sense now. :D
* Heehee, Nicholas is writing down the titles of some specific books he hasn't seen before and wants to read; I recognize The Magic Fishbone, my family had an edition of it illustrated by Hilary Knight (best known as the illustrator of the Eloise books). I've never heard of Perez the Mouse or The Short History of Discovery. LIBRARIANS, THOUGH. ;-)
* Okay, that ended Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, Nicholas and the brownie are heading over to "Lucky's" to get a bite to eat. They talk about bits of New York in so much referential detail that I think I'd enjoy this book a lot better if I were actually there, and in fact I think it must be designed for kids to go around New York City seeing the then-current sights - between the Table of Contents listing different areas of the city for each chapter head, and lines like "Do be careful crossing Fortieth Street," cautioned the Brownie, "it is getting almost as busy as Forty-Second Street and there's no policeman." If that's so, I'm kind of interested to note that in 1925 the Newberys (in their fourth year) were still so small or so not-influential as to put such an extremely local book on the list.
* Huh, Lucky is a lady too! I don't know if she's a fairy or what - is she Lady Luck, the anthropomorphic personification? - but unless The Dream Coach turns out equally well-balanced, this is the only book on the list since the Newberys started that seems likely to have a diverse selection of female characters, and will be the only one till 1928's Downright Dencey (about a Quaker girl and her mother).
* I cannot for all my Googling find out who John Moon and Ann Caraway are, but they're friends of Lucky's whom Nicholas meets. John is about 21, Ann is "a lady of no particular age", which suggests to me she just might be nonfictional. ;-)
* Nicholas and John discuss World War I a little bit - this book is published in 1924 but must be set in the recent past, because John dropped out of college in his freshman year in order to help with the war effort (he drove trench munitions to the front, so that had to be during the actual war, right? Ah, Wiki tells me the battle he mentions was in 1917), and Nicholas wears a poilu's helmet which he picked up on the Chemin des Dames to remind himself that he wants to help child refugees in some way. Kind of pointed, but... showing a very thorough understanding of child psychology? This lady must have been an AMAZING children's librarian. :D
* The brownie goes off to tidy Lucky's kitchen as per her promise to the cook (oh right, she's a brownie! they tidy things!) and then prep for the night's party, and Nicholas and John go with Ann to look in the store windows on Fifth Avenue on their way to hear Christmas carols at Trinity, whatever Trinity is. End chapter two.
* Chapter 3 consists mostly of going to different shops, without enough detail for me to follow what's actually happening. I'm used to reading "virtual tours" of famous cities - they were extremely popular in the 1950s school readers my family had when I was growing up - but this is more of a straight-up tour guide, depending on the reader to actually be there and follow along in the city that's being talked about. So it's... not holding my interest very well. I can just about deduce that "the Favorite" is a store with fancy exhibits in the windows, but what on earth goes on with this in-joke about "looking in a Mirror" when you can't see the shop-windows of the Favorite through the crowds... I CAN'T EVEN. No explanation is offered, and the tone doesn't suggest that any will be; and ninety years past the time, I can't just ask a grown-up as I assume the kids were supposed to.
* There's a remarkably detailed description of the AWESOME NEW TRAFFIC SIGNAL LIGHTS at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, though. They're so enthusiastic about it! ;-) And it's very interesting: green means go for the north-south traffic, red means everybody stop, but yellow means go for the east-west traffic. I guess they didn't have our directional lights yet.
* Nicholas and John go to look at a pet shop on Thirty-first and Fifth - you see what I mean about a tour guide? '"BIRDS and DOGS," shouted Nicholas in big gold letters, above the noise of the traffic at Thirty-first Street.' - while Ann runs on to a bookshop called Brentano's in order to buy Nicholas a Christmas present.
* Ann says "meet me in exactly five flashes", which perplexes me greatly until Nicholas and John cross the street "on the next flash", so... Ann is using changes of the traffic-lights as a way of counting time! Fascinating. I wonder if that was a fad when this book was being written?
* They see the Flatiron Building, then go into Madison Square Garden, where a fairy sings (in a rhymed couplet) that she's the last fairy there and she's lonely. Nicholas asks why she stays; apparently it's to keep the statues company - there seems to be one of the goddess Diana and one of Admiral Farragut - and also to try and "gather enough fairy light" for the big Christmas tree. She snarks really hard about the use of new electric lights in red and green (rather than candles? oh nostalgic snarkypants :P), saying "there is nothing magical about" them and that "it looks more like a rocket than a Christmas Tree". This all makes me lol, because the magic of Christmas trappings is simply in what you've grown up with; multicolored flashing Christmas lights are as much the magic of the season to me as actual candles were in times past. I'm sure people slightly older than me can get just as grumpy about mini-lights as I might about enclosed LED cords, or whatever the next thing is that's going to become mainstream decoration.
(And I mean, you can always mock. LED cords look exactly like neon signs, to the point that you could probably write Merry Christmas in your front yard with them. Mini-lights are so tiny they don't look like Proper Christmas Lights at all... and so forth. *g*)
* Apparently I have strong feelings about nostalgia. ANYWAY.
* Nicholas, Ann, and John now take a "car" - I think it's a trolley-car of some sort, as it has a conductor and tickets - to the church where Ann wants to hear carols sung, Trinity Church.
* Oh, wow! That's right at the end of Wall Street, opposite Zucotti Park, and a couple blocks south of the World Trade Center site. It's one of those little churches surrounded by tall buildings, that are such a classically New York visual.
* So there's a brief Christmas Eve church service, denomination not specified, and then a Living Nativity scene in the vestibule of the church, between the inner and outer front doors; the church is full of hundreds of children, and they all walk round the church in a procession singing Christmas carols till everyone has had a chance to see the Nativity scene. ...oh, wow, "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was a brand-new hymn when this was written! O_O I didn't realize it was by the same Phillips Brooks as "Everywhere, everywhere, Christmas tonight"; it's a lot more standard poetry form.
* World War I was only six years past, at the time this was published, and it's everywhere in this book; Ann recalls Fifth Avenue being blocked off and people dancing in the streets (for False Armistice Day? I have the very faintest recollection of hearing about this), and the service flag with blue and gold memorial stars is still up in Trinity Church.
* In the next chapter, they head down toward the Battery, and we hear a long, long story about somebody called Oloffe von Kortlandt whom Washington Irving has apparently written about who was also historical? I don't know. We had a book of Washington Irving stories when I was little but I never got through any except Rip van Winkle and The Headless Horseman. They were all terribly slow, I thought. Anyway, this Oloffe fellow sails right round Manhattan Island on a dream from St Nicholas and gets shipwrecked, and blames the porpoises, and on the way back home stops at the southern tip of Manhattan and eats oysters and has another dream which convinces him to move his colony to Manhattan from the Jersey shore? And they "buy" the island from the natives (there is of course no questioning at all of any of the ethics of this, it's just How We Came To Be Here Because New York Is Awesome, very "beautiful old stories" in tone, very... settled acceptance of the course of history-as-told-by-white-people), and move the colony, celebration celebration memorial-chapel-right-here-in-Bowling-Green-Park the end.
* HAHAHAHAHA apparently the story was told here in straight-up Washington Irving's own words for the most part? John Moon explains that he liked it so well as a boy he's remembered most of it verbatim. Which, y'know, is something that actually happens, but I'm very amused by how casually it's just happened in a book with no worries about copyright or anything. (I mean, the publishing house - GP Putnam's Sons - actually has "The Knickerbocker Press" under their name in the front of the book, so they may well own the Washington Irving "Knickerbocker Stories" copyright, or else copyright laws just weren't what they are now. I don't know.)
* Now they walk through Battery Park and talk about the history of Castle Clinton, Castle Garden, or the West Battery, the round building after which Battery Park is named. At publication, it was a public aquarium; before that, it had been a concert hall; the writer skips over the half-century in between when it was the Emigrant Landing Depot, before Ellis Island opened. Immigration isn't one of "our beautiful old stories" - sorry, it's very neatly handled, I'm just feeling snarky.
* Anyway, that ends Chapter 5, and Chapter 6 consists of more shopping. It's only about five pages - a flower shop, an Italian pastry place, and another bus. I realize this must have been very interesting to kids who lived in New York when it was current and could actually follow the directions given, but I did not sign up for this to read a ninety-year-old tour pamphlet! O_O
* Chapter 7, yet more shopping. "The Mirror" turns out to be a large sweetshop, and "The Favorite" is... Woolworth's? "All the presents at the Favorite cost either five cents or ten cents". Good grief - I have to admit, the time-capsule aspects of this book are really interesting. Not the existence of a five-and-ten, I knew about those, but the fact that this book was printed when some of these things weren't even household words yet. :-)
* They put all the Christmas presents in a taxi and ride down to drop John Moon off at Penn Station, which is still "the Pennsylvania Station". Then they see the Post Office, and "the Night Before Christmas Country" (I have no idea what the author is talking about here), and do some more shopping.
* Ann Caraway has a nephew Joe Star, down from Maine. The Brownie has sent over a hamper of Christmas goodies for him and Nicholas, and the three of them have a very detailed supper together.
* Oh, here is the explanation of the "Night Before Christmas Country". Apparently they're near the region where the poem "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" (actual title: "A Visit from St Nicholas") was written. Ann Caraway reads us the first dozen lines or so, and Joe Star explains the whole story of its writing; I don't know if it's the true story or not, as it sounds rather like those poetical stories about the writing of the lyrics to Silent Night which are so much less interesting than the ACTUAL story about the music, with the mice.
* Nicholas goes to bed while Ann and Joe go to hear more carols sung at a different church, and this ends Chapter 7.
* Santa Claus wakes Nicholas up and takes him to... Washington Irving's house? And there are a lot of words without much substance, but they watch together as "the Knickerbockers", who are (I gather from context) the founders of New Amsterdam about whom Washington Irving wrote some stories I haven't read, troop down... the sides of the Kaatskills? Somewhere, I am not following this, I need more location data! O_O Anyway, and Nicholas and W.I. go to intercept them, end of chapter.
* We cut back to the Brownie, prepping for her big party at the Library. She talks to the two stone Lions who sit at the front doors, and they suggest... a super-big party? Because Nicholas. So the Brownie is like "omg I must do ALL the preparations!" and gets very hustled.
* I do not know who this Boy Wizard is who's being a central figure of the preparations. I can't tell if he's a fictional character I should recognize, or somebody like the two Lions and little Lucie Lenox (who is clearly a statue) from the real NY Public Library, or just a random wizard like our random brownie.
* Most of the rest of the chapter is about the specifics of how the Library is to be magically rearranged for the party, which walls to take out and so forth. Mary Mapes Dodge shows up, out of the pages of a children's periodical she wrote for? And now I am very confused, because everyone is going on about how long it's been since they had a party, like basically never, and I thought the Brownie gave one every year. Maybe that's just for the Children's Room people, but these all seem to be the Children's Room people. *frowns*
* AHAHAHAHA the animals are going to have a circus and an exhibition, and the cows of the Knickerbockers are going to do a piece on City Planning, because of how "they laid out all the streets in the lower part of Manhattan on their way to pasture." BRB LOLING FOREVER. :D
* Yeah, I am utterly confused now: there is a painting on the wall called "The Duchess" who is complaining about not being invited to help with the party (this part does not confuse me *g*), and the Brownie tells her to take over the Children's Room and throw whatever kind of party she wants in it, because "we've made no plans for it tonight". I thought the centerpiece of the Christmas party was the Children's Room! I don't know. O_O
* The Duchess leads a cotillion of eighteenth-century people and then decides to join in the big party instead of throwing one of her own, and now it's almost midnight and Nicholas is providing Plot Tension by being absent, but we're only on page 100 of 331? I am seriously and completely confused. I might not finish this book.
* On flipping very quickly through the rest of the book, I see that Nicholas is staying in New York till the day before Easter, and is going to visit ALL THE FANTASY CRITTERS EVER. He's going to the pantomime and the circus, spending New Year's up in Maine with Ann Caraway and Joe Star, et cetera... and finally, Ann is going to sail to Europe with Nicholas in the last chapter! They promise to be back very soon, with new book recommendations, because librarian. XD
I'm not going to read all the rest of this. I gave it a fair shot, 100 pages, and I see why not even my old library of completism owned it. It was a good book at the time and for the place it was written in, but it doesn't have much interest beyond that place and time.
I still would've voted to give it the Newbery above "Tales from Silver Lands" if it had had that absolute necessity of tour-books which are intended to replace rather than supplement a trip to the place: better visual descriptions, fewer El stops. :P