Winter Holiday

I'm reading Winter Holiday aloud to my daughter. She is loving it.

I'm not sure where I got the book, but it's an old Penguin edition (the kind that says it's not available in the United States), and it has a sticker on the front that says "25 cents."

It's refreshing to read about a time when kids could go off on their own day and night, play on boats, light fires, make tea, and do all kinds of dangerous things. The parents are generally absent in this kind of book (in this case, they are off digging up things in Egypt - what could be more appropriate?). The children spend all their time outdoors, imagining, playing, having adventures. They go indoors only to sleep and for the occasional meal, or when they are in quarantine for some childhood disease that has long since been eliminated and for which we vaccinate our infants. You can't imagine these children ever riding in a car seat, or wearing a bike helmet, or, for that matter, getting in any trouble that they can't figure out how to get out of.

There are things about that world that I miss. Even in my own childhood, which wasn't quite as far distant, or as unsupervised, as the one portrayed in this book, it seems that we played much more independently than children do today. I didn't grow up in a place where kidnapping was a threat, either.