Christmas Is All Around Us

Ages ago, my brother Jimmy brought me to a bookstore in honor of my ninth birthday. The bookstore was Half Price Books, and I had never been there before, but it didn’t take me long to fall in love with the place. He told me I could pick out one book that he would buy for me as my birthday present. I searched for a long time, looking through each little aisle and cubby. The one I finally picked out was a pretty little poetry book, my first poetry book ever, that has made a significant impact on my literary tastes. I think at the time I was mostly interested in the green-cloth spine with gold lettering, and the idyllic Pre-Raphaelite-esque illustrations inside.

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I was in fourth grade then, and one of our tasks for the year was to memorize and recite one poem a week in front of the entire class. With the help of my book I was able to recite the likes of Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, William Blake’s The Tyger, Walt Whitman’s O Captain, My Captain! and even most of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. My classmates, on the other hand, were still mostly amused by Shel Silverstein on a regular basis. I’m sure they must have been dreadfully bored by my selections. I didn’t understand the verses any better than the rest of them, but I loved the way they sounded. They had a feel and a mystery to them that poor old Shel just couldn’t seem to muster. (Not that Shel’s poems aren’t fantastic in their own right.)

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I’ve loved my poetry book for many years since, and I’ve returned many, many times to that bookstore. Especially in these frugal times, it’s comforting to know that I can walk into my favorite Half Price Books with a dollar bill or two and some change, and walk out again with some little treasure that will likely keep me entertained, at the very least, for several hours. If I’m really lucky I’ll walk away with the potential for something much more profound than entertainment. Most of the books on my shelves have come from that bookstore, and there have been countless more that have passed through my hands and gone back to that place, to be put back into the cycle for someone else to discover and treasure.

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Every year during the holidays I pick up one of their handy calendars, mostly because they have coupons in the back. I hardly ever remember to use them, but it’s nice to know that they are there. The calender itself gives the names of famous authors who were born on each date. Many of them I recognize and love, but just as often I come across a name that I don’t know anything about.

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Today’s is Par Lagerkvist.

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Typically I don’t bother about the names I don’t know, not really caring enough to take the time to find out about someone who has never crossed my path in a literary fashion. But today, since I had the time and needed something to write about, I figured I’d give old Par a good googling at the very least.

Par was a Swedish author born in 1891. He was one of those people who knew from the get-go that he wanted to be a writer, unlike so many others who just happen upon it while they are still working their day job. He was a playwright, a poet, and a novelist. He liked to focus on heavy subjects like good and evil, war, and politics. He received the Nobel prize for literature in 1951, following the publication of his most famous work, Barrabbas, which actually sounds pretty interesting.

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For a Nobel prize winner, there wasn’t a huge wealth of information on the web about Par or his works. I couldn’t find a lot in the way of quotations, though I did find one little quip that I think is perfectly suited to the impetus behind Christmas Is All Around Us:

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“One for whom the pebble has value must be surrounded by treasures wherever he goes.”

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Happy Birthday, Par.