Let Us Celebrate the Season!

By Brigitta Gisella Geltrich-Ludgate

It is in the air. Halloween has passed, and so has Thanksgiving, and we are in December. Christmas is near. Let Us Celebrate the Season! is a different kind of advent calendar. There are twenty-seven poems and stories, each to be read on the day you open the book in December, should it be December 1 or December 21 or any other December day. I remember my mother doing so with a rather special Advent calendar when my sister and I were children. Every evening, she took my sister and me on her lap, and we talked about the little verse on the calendar door and what it meant. It was always such a special event.

Hope you find this book special as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546263821

Brigitta Gisella Geltrich-Ludgate

Brigitta Gisella Geltrich-Ludgate was born in Kitale of the British East African colony, today’s Kenya, and was raised until school age on a farm with the name Kalua-Estates. She received her basic education in various European countries as well as in a boarding school in Lucerne, Switzerland. Even though Lucerne is in the German Swiss, the school conducted all its classes and communications in French. Her BA and MA degrees were earned at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her Ph.D. studies were completed at the University of California Berkeley and the University of California Los Angeles. She holds an AA degree in creative writing from the Palmer Writer School, at-tended several years of memoire writing through the Monterey Peninsula College, where she had the opportunity to share her writings with fellow students, most of them outstanding writers, and bought several courses in creative writing from The Great Courses. As professor in academia, she has numerous academic as well as creative writings presented at national conferences and published in academic journals as well as in local papers. She is the author of twenty-four books, with two volumes of memoires in the final stages and a novel about a father and son moving to Alaska almost completed.

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© 2018 Brigitta Gisella Geltrich-Ludgate. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/17/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-6381-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-6382-1 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-6383-8 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018912305

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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A Different Kind of

Advent Calendar!

Contents

Introduction

Door 1 Tooth-Fairy, Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Maybe Bah!

Door 2 The Desert Star

Door 3 No Hustle, No Bustle

Door 4 A Christmas Rain Puddle

Door 5 A Letter to Santa

Door 6 Did Santa Claus Come?

Door 7 Gift of the Birds

Door 8 Did You Know …

Door 9 Santa and Mrs. Claus in Carmel-by-the-Sea

Door 10 Evening Bells

Door 11 The Christmas Passage

Door 12 Christmas Heralds

Door 13 Poor and Rich in the Glow of Lights

Door 14 Santa Claus Has Concerns

Door 15 I Hear a Little Bell Ringing

Door 16 Christmas Times of the Past

Door 17 The Tallest Christmas Tree

Door 18 The Blackbird’s Song

Door 19 JJ, Santa’s Son

Door 20 Do You See the Star?

Door 21 The Perfect Christmas

Door 22 Confusion at North-Pole Junction Zero

Door 23 A Special Christmas

Door 24 The Reluctant Christmas Spruce

Door 25 The Crooked Little Fir Tree’s Reward

Door 26 Not another Confusion!

Door 27-31 New Year’s Day

Books by the Author

Introduction

It is in the air. Halloween has passed and so has Thanksgiving and we are in December. Christmas is near. Let’s Celebrate the Season! is a different kind of advent calendar. There are twenty seven poems and stories, each to be read on the day you open the book in December: should it be December the 1st or December the 21st or any other December day. I remember my mother doing so with a rather special Advent Calendar when my sister and I were children. Every evening she took my sister and me on her lap and we talked about the little verse on the calendar door and what it meant. It was always such a special event.

Hope you find this book special as well.

Love,

The Author

Brigitta Gisella Geltrich-Ludgate

Door 1

Tooth-Fairy, Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Maybe Bah!

They said that I was precocious. The adults said so. I don’t know what that means, but I assume it is something that makes you being grownup! I didn’t believe anymore in any of these fairytale things my parents were still talking about. I was seven. I was a boy. I was nearly grown up, for heaven’s sakes!

Well, that was not really the reason, why I didn’t believe in fairy tales anymore. I was let down by the Tooth-Fairy. And that was the case, why I have my doubts. I lost a tooth and put it under my pillow and next day the tooth was still there. No money to replace it. I didn’t tell any of my friends. They wouldn’t understand. They were still believers. I had become a non-believer. I let my parents believe I didn’t care that the Tooth-Fairy did not come when I lost my tooth. My parents acted as if nothing had happened. My mom saw the hole in my mouth and asked surprised, When did you lose that?

What? I asked back.

Your tooth?

Oh that, a couple of days ago.

My mom turned to my dad. Dan, she said, Johnny lost a tooth a couple of days ago.

My dad had me open my mouth to look into it. Yeah, so he did.

Neither my mom nor my dad asked whether I had put the tooth under my pillow. They mumbled something about me having written a note to the Tooth-Fairy. Did I do that? Since I shook my head, my parents looked kind of sheepishly at each other and mumbled something for me to try again.

I didn’t. I let it pass. After all, I was convinced that the Tooth-Fairy did not exist, note to her from me or no note. For that matter neither did the Easter Bunny exist or even Santa Claus. Easter was coming up and I looked at all the stores at their Easter decorations. There was no indication that the Easter bunny existed and had decorated the windows. The store personnel were doing the job. They adjusted the displays, no Easter Bunny anywhere. Some stores had their window displays animated and a little girl, probably half my age—she was at least half my size—claimed, Mommy, see, there is the Easter Bunny!

I knew better. It was just a mechanical cardboard thing, not an Easter Bunny. I walked off. This year my parents were not going to fool me, telling me and my younger sister Nancy that the Easter Bunny had been in our yard, hiding colored eggs and gifts. If Nancy believed it, that was her doing. I didn’t believe it. I knew that my parents snug out early in the morning and hid all the Easter eggs and the toys. They didn’t fool me. After all, I was seven, almost grown up, for heaven’s sakes!

Well, Easter morning came. I had to convince myself that there was