Good evening and welcome to boring books for bedtime. I hope tonight's installment

provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep for once.

So lie back, adjust your volume.

Take a nice deep breath.

And off we go. This evening's reading celebrates the holidays. We're reading

old Christmas from the Sketchbook of Washington Irving illustrated by R. Caldecott, published by McMillan and Co, London, 1886. Let's begin. Before the remembrance of the good old times, so fast passing

should have entirely passed away. The present artist R. Caldecott, and engraver James D. Cooper plan to illustrate

Washington Irving's old Christmas in this manner.

Their primary idea was to carry out the principle of the sketchbook by incorporating the designs

with the text. Throughout they have worked together and Conamore.

With what success the public must decide, November 1875.

A man might then behold, at Christmas in each hall,

good fires to curb the cold, and meet for great and small. The neighbors were friendly

bidden and all had welcomed true. The poor from the gates were not chidden when this old cap was new, an old song.

There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination

than the lingering of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the

main morning of life when as yet I only knew the world through books and believed it to be all that poets had painted it.

And they bring with them the flavor of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal

fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred,

social and joyous than at present.

I regret to say that they are daily growing more and more faint, being gradually

worn away by time, but still more obliterated by modern fashion.

...