Happy Thanksgiving!!
Yes, I know it’s a bit delayed. I’ve been busy, you know, eating.
…And almost getting myself killed…getting a Christmas tree
So, it all started with my lovely aunt walking into my grandmother’s house the day after Thanksgiving and asking me to help her go get a Christmas tree. So, I put on my shoes and a sweatshirt and followed her out the door.
I should probably insert here that my grandmother lives in the middle of nowhere. And she has a lot of land.
So, anyways, we’re driving along, heading toward the Christmas tree farm when I notice the truck is sloooowing down, and my aunt is clearly not looking at the road. So of course I ask her what she’s doing.
Without looking at me…or the road, if I might add, she points to a bunch of bushes off the side of the road and says, “I think we can get that one.”
Me: “No!”
Her: “Why not? It’s perfect!”
Me: “I thought we were going to a tree farm, like normal people.”
Her: “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Me: “I have a sense of adventure. This is redneck adventure, it’s a completely different category!”
Needless to say, I lost this argument.
The tree was literally growing out of a ditch, surrounded by a bunch of briars. Sooo…we had to climb down into the ditch, cut as many briars out as we could, and cut down the tree. At which point, I had to climb back out of the ditch, grab the truck and my aunt’s hand, and essentially form a human chain to tug the tree out of the ditch.
All that work for a free Christmas tree. And I’m still pulling briars out of my boots.
Oh! And I read a book!
First, before I say anything else, let me just say: I love this book! Backman has a wonderfully innovative way of storytelling; the book essentially uses fairy tales to tell the story and interweaves the characters and their own individual stories beautifully as it follow seven-year-old Elsa in an adventure that her journey toward forgiving her grandmother for dying.
I love how Backman gradually blurs the lines between fantasy and reality as a way to show the reader the truth behind everyone’s part in the story, and he does it all from the point of view of a young girl, which ends up giving it the same sense of innocence that many fairy tales have.
And the way he chooses to describe things certainly doesn’t hurt. For example: “People have to tell their stories, Elsa, or else they suffocate.” And again: “And Maud bakes cookies, because when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been broken in too many ways to ever be fixed again, Maud doesn’t know what weapon to use if one can’t use dreams.”
So, this book is beautiful and innocent, and different. And that’s kind of the whole point: sometimes different is good.
I definitely recommend.
