For the upcoming Holiday Season, the BLS Library Blog will be away until the New Year. Brooklyn Law School and the BLS Library will close on Saturday, December 22 and will reopen on Wednesday, January 2.
BLS Library users looking for inspirational reading for the holidays will enjoy the short 84 page book Memory of a Large Christmas by Lillian Smith (1897-1966). Written fifty years ago in 1962, the book recounts Christmases of fifty years earlier in the South which Smith recalls as being certainly big with lots of people who ate lots of food in a house with lots of room. From the preface of Thanksgiving through the hog-killing, gift-buying, stocking-hanging and finally the main event, the small volume is packed with illustrations and a few recipes. Smith‘s recollection of Christmas as a child at the turn of the last century transports the reader to a kinder and gentler time where the anticipation of hog killing is a wondrous and dreaded occasion. In addition to being a writer, Smith became a vocal social critic of the Southern United States. A white woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality, she was a southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, at a time when such actions almost guaranteed social ostracism.
Best wishes for the Holiday Season and a Happy New Year!
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