Christmas is getting very close now, and tonight we took a break from our TV Christmas specials and Santa Claus stake-out to read an old favorite Christmas book.
First, though, Miss Chrissy brought out some clothes she recently got for us at the Thrift Shop Boutique, and we were all very excited to put on new outfits. It was my turn to wear the blue polar bear jammies, but Tillie was more than willing to hand them over when
she saw the cute little green polka dot jammies Miss Chrissy had for her to wear. As you can see, the strawberries among the polka dots declare that Tillie is “Berry Sweet”! How cute!
Trixie put together another “Pretty in Pink” outfit, this one also sporting polka dots on the footie pants, as well as polka dots on a sleepy-eyed elephant! Whoever heard of a brown and white polka dot elephant? Not me! But he certainly looks contented. And I love the flowers on his ears!
Anyway, here we are in our new outfits, feeling all cozy and ready for a good book, and what does Miss Chrissy pull from the shelf but Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree! We all squealed with delight, remembering this book from long ago. As we’ve often mentioned, we Whimsies are NOT babies, but we were born in 1960, and this book was printed in 1963, so we fondly remember it from way back when, when we were actually children.
Miss Chrissy confessed that she did not remember this book from her childhood, since at the time, she was a strict devotee of Dr. Seuss and Beverly Cleary. She only came across Mr. Willowby when her own children (who are now grown) were little, and loved to read everything they could get their hands on —Seuss, Cleary, Willowby, Sendak, Scarry, Curious George, Berenstain Bears and Goosebumps, to name a few. The list goes on and on!
Tillie, Trixie and I like some of those books too, but tonight, we were just so happy to see Mr. Willowby again, and read his tale with glee!
As the story goes, a rich man, Mr. Willowby, gets an enormous Christmas tree to place in his enormous house…but it’s just a little too tall, so he has Baxter the Bulter get up on this enormously tall ladder to snip off the very top. The top of the tree goes to Mr. Willowby’s upstairs maid, who finds the tree a wee bit too tall for her table, so she snips off the top and it ends up in the house of the gardener…who snips the top, which is 
adopted by some bears, who snip the top, which ends up going to the Fox family, and the tippy-top of their tree makes the Rabbit family very happy, but it’s too tall for their mantle so they snip-snip, and little Mistletoe Mouse takes that snip to his house, and it’s just perfect for his family! And what do you know? The Mouse family lives in a mouse hole in the baseboard of Mr. Willowby’s enormous house, right next to Mr. Willowby’s enormous Christmas tree.
So the moral of this story is that there is always enough Christmas tree to go around for everyone.
Sort of like Christmas Spirit.
I like this book because the rhymes are fun, and also because there’s a fat cat who belongs to the upstairs maid, and that cat kind of reminds me of Mr. Squee. Mr. Squee sat and listened to the story as it was read, and I think he enjoyed it, though he pretended to be sleeping at the time.
Next we want to re-read Never Tease a Weasel, which also has a lot of fun rhymes in it. But I think we’re going to wait until after Christmas, because right now the Christmas Spirit is so intense, who can concentrate on anything else?
