The Giftgiver
This week a dream came true—a dream that also feels like a miracle. My husband Ned’s story of St. Nicolas was published as a children’s book through IVPKids (which is an imprint of InterVarsity Press… the very book publishing company that has produced books which have been pretty influential to Ned and me since our college years!). Ned’s book was actually the inaugural book for their new imprint. How this became a book for them to publish is a whole other story and a whole other miracle.
Ned and I thought we would share with you, the reader, the backstory to Saint Nicolas the Giftgiver.
Imagine you are with us on our backyard patio, one early October evening, sitting around a fire in our fire pit. The moon is hanging out behind a cloud, crickets are chirping, lights are strung along our fence, and our dog Pevensie is anxious for your constant attention. I would probably give you a mug of hot cider or apple pie. You will share with us what has been happening in your life and then ask us about our projects. Ned will be excited to share about his books coming out with IVPKids. Since a few advanced copies have already arrived, we happily show you. Following is our imaginary conversation with you, with my comments in bold:
Ned, when did you originally write this? I don’t really remember!
I recall in the early days of our church Wheatland that I had a manuscript of it and I asked a few people for help with writing it. I also asked our good friend Lisa to help, too, because she was an English professor. But before that I had done several illustrations for Christmas posters for Macy’s West, and one of them was a picture of Santa Claus with a pack on his back. It looked rough, like a woodcut, even though I didn’t really know how to do printmaking at all. It would be over a decade later that my friend Matthew Clark would train me in the medium.
When does this happen compared to when our stockings were miraculously filled with gifts at Christmas?
Definitely later. I think it was 1994, and Carey was 10 months old. I remember video taping me feeding her on Christmas morning and talking to her about the stockings that were miraculously filled. I showed them to you later and pretended to be just as mystified as Carey as to how they had been filled. But there was no art to go along with the story yet. Although I had been drawing pictures of Santa Claus for years and year growing up, it would be a few years later when I would draw the pictures for Macy’s West that inspired this book.
So how old was Carey when you first wrote it? I remember we were discussing what to do about Santa Claus, because we had already decided to give her and each other three gifts to represent the gifts Jesus received from the three Magi. (Of course those gifts needed to be really nice and worthwhile!) But we still knew we wanted to do stocking stuffers.
Maybe she was three? Four? We had those nice Land’s End embroidered stockings with Victorian-like angels or cherubs. The three gifts predate the story. Somehow the story got written, and I think I made a dozen little books with those illustrations. We gave them as Christmas presents. They were 5x5 inch square books and the cover was olive green with a square out of the middle cover so that the faux woodcut of St. Nicolas on the title page could show through
Yes, Carey was three or four when we did the first edition. But we haven’t talked about writing the story yet. I know we were in the first house we ever bought, that sweet little place on Atkins Avenue.
Oh yes. The whole point of writing it was because we already had St Nicolas stockings magically being filled, as well as the three gifts. This story was written to give a backstory to the stocking stuffers. We were already calling them the St. Nicolas stockings (being intentional to try to make Christmas as Christ-centered as we could and to try to be as unconsumeristic as possible…
Except for all those Legos and American Girl dolls and clothes that came on Christmas. But that is later on when our other two were born.
Well, we had good intentions. Anyway, there was this idea to write a story, but I don’t know why, except I wanted to write a story for Carey, and then you probably said that we could make it into a Christmas gifts for friends. Since we are history buffs it made sense that it would build on the actual life of St. Nicolas.
And you have always loved fairy tales and Narnia and mythology and . . .
. . . and time travel!
One of the big things I wanted to address was the question of how Nicholas gets to everyone’s house in one night. Do you remember the first version with Joulupukki the Yule goat and my story of how Black Peter teaches St. Nicolas to go down the chimney? And sine St. Nicolas is the patron saint of sailors, I had to include him sailing. But I remember the big idea I wanted to sneak into the book was how he can get to everyone in one night. My solution was to take him out of time. My thought was when he left Myra as an old man he just put the sack on his back and started walking. And he never stopped, so time had to stop for him. Then the miracle was that his bag of gifts never empties. As he walks around the world sometimes Black Peter helps him, sometimes Joulupukki shows up with a little sled. When oceans are in his way, a boat is there, and then when he can’t keep going on foot, reindeer and a sleigh will appear. As the bag never ends, God always provides what he needs to give gifts and to get to the places to deliver them.
The original story didn’t rhyme and wasn’t in stanza form. It was straight story, and you kept revising it. Wasn’t one a full-color version?
Yes – I think it was one of my first gallery shows. I printed out large panels with the art and story on them and we hung them in Café Angst—my friend’s new coffee shop.
We did read the story with our girls on St. Nicolas Day when we gave them their Christmas pajamas. Remember at first I didn’t know that there were actual traditions—especially in Germany—for December 6th?
And then we would also sit the book on a bookshelf with three gold balls as part of our Christmas decorations.
Eventually other versions of the story were developed—single sheet stories when the girls were older, and we decided to celebrate St. Nicolas Day by sharing the story with our church Care Group friends who had children. I made up gift bags with chocolate coins, clementines, and the story. We would deliver them on December 6th and I would tell the parents they needed to read the story.
And you still do—because we still celebrate St. Nicholas Day.
Isn’t it fun that some kids still look forward to those St. Nicolas gifts and know that they are coming on December 6th? I think we have been sharing these gifts for more than a decade.
These versions of the story on one sheet were one of the reasons I would keep tweaking the story. You would ask me to print them out to get the gifts ready, and I would reread it and find things I wanted to fix. And sometimes I added in a coloring page. Also, at this time every year I would say to myself that I needed to fix the story for real, and you would say “and you should figure out how to get it published.” A couple years ago I did really work on it and asked one of Carey’s writer friends to help me. She locked into the fact that I kept having a repeated line of “On and on Saint Nicholas journeyed. When he had traveled the length and breadth of a country, whether by foot or by sleigh, he would go right on to the next. The stars did not dim, and the moon did not wane, nor did his large sack of gifts grow light,” and she suggested I put the whole thing in meter form.
This was Joy Strawbridge, right?
Yes. And it is so fun to think she is writing now for your upcoming book. Her advice got me to thinking: “Can I retell this story using Clement C. Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicolas as a grid…? So I did start reworking it in the meter of this poem. At that point I think I was even trying to save lines from his poem to make it connect more.
Now it just alludes to some of the elements from Moore’s poem.
Yes, the problem was that I didn’t want to give up on the ideas in my original story. And it changed even more when my editor at IVP pointed out the rough rhyming parts and helped make it so much better than my original.
I have always known it would make a good book, and that some publishing company would see how families would love this story. I’m glad that you told IVP Kids about it—after Luci Shaw connected you with them because of The O in Hope. So I guess the real miracle of Christmas for us this year is that it became a real book.
But now what are we going to do for St. Nicolas Day? All of our care group friends have copies of the book!
The original cover of the original little book.
From the December 6th coloring pages we would share with friends.
