Once Upon a Christmas Time

New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Sixth Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Format is approximately 5.25 inches by 7.5 inches. 92, [4] pages. Illustrations. Signed by the author on fep. Thyra Ferre Bjorn was one of eight children born to a clergyman in Swedish Lapland. In 1924, her father received a call to a Swedish church in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the family came to America. Thyra married another native from Sweden, Robert Bjorn. Mrs. Blorn's works, largely "fiction based on fact," as she once described them, included the best selling "Papa's Wife," published in 1955. Others were "Pa pa's Daughter," "Mama's Way," "Dear Papa," "Once Upon a Christmas Tree," "This Is My Life," "The Home Has a Heart" and "Then There Grew Up a Generation." Her last hook, "The Golden Acre," will be published next month. Derived from a Kirkus review: The author of Papa's Wife and successive volumes about her pastor father's family looks back down the years to the time when she celebrated the Christmas season with her Papa, Mama, seven brothers and sisters, and friends in Sweden. The holiday began with the Festival of Lights of December thirteenth and ended with Epiphany on the sixth of January. Between times, there came the Christmas baking and cleaning, the demise and preparation of the Christmas Pig, the buying of small gifts at the variety store; Christmas Eve with the traditional smorgasbord; Christmas and the church service at dawn followed some days later by the boisterous ceremony of robbing the Christmas tree. Rather a remove from the experience, yet a warm if standard recollection of Christmas in another land.