For B's amusement I wrote a short dissertation worthy of my college days about this book that I found at the Jimmy Hale Mission on Saturday.

It starts on page one, where a family of bears are being driven through the snow by one small horse. I did my research (on Wikipedia, where there are absolutely no issues with falsiness). A female brown bear in adulthood can range between 290-440 pounds, and a male brown bear between 400-790 pounds, unless he's one of the few male brown bears who can make it up to around 1000 pounds. The horse in no way has the appearance of being a dray horse, and we must assume that any horse of any size can comfortably pull half of its weight. Going by the appearances of the illustrations of the book, this does not seem likely. The whole book is unseemly. This could never possibly happen in a million years.

Do you see where I'm going here? I won't bore you with any more details, nor will I give you the complete dissertation. I will merely state that when I found this book lying under a pile of magazines at the thrift store, my heart skipped a beat because I owned this as a child way back in 1980. Flipping through the pages I could have wept, especially seeing the African ostrich running through the snow. That is an image I've filed away in my head for some time now, and seeing her again brought up images of my mother reading this to me at Christmas.

I'm sure they still print this book, and if you have a little one, please pick it up for them. Leave it to me to in some way mock a precious memory. On the cheeky side, I will say that it is very unlikely that any of these animals would ever pile into a sleigh with critters who could easily see them as dinner. ( )