I’ve never seen a purple cow

When you were a little kid, there were certain books that you probably read over and over through the years and maybe even have memorized. (What are the first books to come to mind now that you’ve read that sentence?)

For me, one of those was actually a series of books put out by World Book Enyclopedia… The Childcraft How and Why Library. It was an encyclopedia collection for children. Get it? I think they’re out of print, but you can still get them today from various vendors online.

We were pretty broke for most of my childhood, but my parents made sure we had a good education. And part of that education was having good books to read. These things weren’t cheap. And for a family of four on a shoestring budget, they were virtually out of reach. But my folks made it happen. And, for Christmas Eve every single year of our lives, we’d pull out this book “Poems and Rhymes”, open it to A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore (that’s the second photo) and read it aloud together as a family. We’d each take turns reading a a couple of verses and passing it over to the next person. And when we got to the end we’d all shout in unison that famous line, “A happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

Now that we kids have grown and have moved away from home, we all have to read the poem over the phone to each other (most recently we’ve been using FaceTime!). But, to this day, we have never missed a Christmas Eve.

That third photo is The Purple Cow, by Gelett Burgess, my absolute favorite poem in the whole entire world. It’s absurd and it’s meaningless and it’s short. And I can still recite all four verses from memory to this day. ;)

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