The Christmas Story - Santa's Favorite Story - I Am Christmas

The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey 

The Christmas Story

written by  Berthe Amoss

The story of the first Christmas is told here in the majestic words of the King James Version of the Bible. Behind the 24 windows are some of the world's greatest paintings from the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Each hidden window, when opened in sequence, day by day, beginning December 1, reveals a different painting and accompanying text telling the Christmas story, from Isaiah's prophecy of a messiah to the flight into Egypt. The windows surround Gerard David's exquisite painting, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted about 1510. Gerard David (1460-1523) is usually considered the last great painter of the Bruges School. While the basic text that the painting interprets is provided by Matthew (2:13), an account of the Rest in the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew recounts how on the third day of the journey, the Virgin rested beneath a palm tree and the Infant made the tree bend down to provide her with fruit. Joseph's nut-gathering may be interpreted as a variation on the palm tree miracle. David depicted trees and plants with great accuracy, and it is quite possible that much of the flora is invested with symbolic meaning. The
Rest on the Flight into Egypt is one of David's loveliest and most tranquil works. The 10 x 13 calendar has an easel back. It comes in a resealable poly bag.

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"Christmas is pish-posh," grumbles Jonathan Toomey, the best wood carver in the valley. He's a Scroogelike recluse; but he's a gentle grouch, it turns out, and he hides a sad secret. He's transformed, not by Dickensian ghosts, but by an eager seven-year-old boy and his widowed mother who ask him to make them a Christmas creche. The story verges on the sentimental, but it's told with feeling and lyricism (he "traveled till his tears stopped" ). Lynch's sweeping illustrations, in shades of wood grain, are both realistic and gloriously romantic, focusing on faces and hands at work before the fire and in the lamplight. In a beautiful, elemental scene, the angry wood carver stands on the threshold of his home, disturbed by the gentle widow and her son who want his help and will transform his life. As full of wonder as Christmas itself, this is a story that will not long be forgotten, one that will be read and treasured for many Christmases to come. A woodcarver's broken and bitter heart warms to the spirit of the season, when he is approached by a widow who asks him to carve a new creche in time for Christmas--and allow her young son to watch. Full color.