November is my favorite month of the year! You get the moodiest beautiful autumn month, THANKSGIVING, and even a dash of Christmas. What better way do I like to celebrate any time of year than with a children’s books curation. Here are the links to the previous (yet still pertinent) autumn book lists: apples and early fall, classic autumn, and reformation day. Now, let’s do a thanksgiving session!
I love curating book collections (and I don’t discriminate against “lower” art mediums so movies too) that are beautiful or good in some way to share with others. And I am highly selective! In general what I look for in children’s literature (and all art forms) is a piece that somehow captures some of whatever is true, noble, just, pure, lovely, of good report, of any virtue, or praiseworthy.
Books that come out into the house annually for a season are going to be pretty powerful for family culture so I want to find good ones. I consider this work to be refining a child’s palette. I am helping shape an appetite for what is beautiful, as defined by God.
All of my Thanksgiving books are christian, of course, because this is a christian holiday. This can be in one of two ways. First, if a book has the story of plymouth and massachusetts bay, it must include the explicit historical, christian motivations of the events. I don’t include books that fragile-ly skip over the enormous WHY the pilgrims came, to just talk about the survival story. Or, lots of books try to include once only the stock phrase that puritans couldn’t worship “the way they wanted” in europe, which is a harmful summary, setting an individualistic message present day. (And a little trite for the theological and liturgical differences puritans had from anglicans.) Give your kids the severe, brave story of masculine men and feminine women who brought christ’s reign of heaven and earth to bear on one specific spot of land, beautifully creating an unambiguously christian state.
Or second, I have included seasonal books with the relevant themes of gratitude, generations, fellowship around food, domesticity, and tradition. Thankfulness always has an object. Our gratitude is to the one true God.
- The Blessings Jar by Colleen Coble
- Sleep Tight Farm by Eugenie Doyle
- Three Young Pilgrims by Cheryl Harness
- Spot’s Thanksgiving by Eric Hill
- A Very Thankful Prayer by Bonnie Jensen
- The Voyage of the Mayflower by Allison Lassieur
- …If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 by Ann McGovern
- Sharing the Bread: An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving Story by Pat Miller
- Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving by Eric Metaxas
- This is the Feast by Diane Shore
- Thankful by Eileen Spinelli
- God Blesses Us with Thanksgiving by Evana Vincent
All of these on amazon (at time of posting) would be $138 to have the whole slate. If you wanted just a few, I’d say the shortlist of the very, very best are Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving, Sleep Tight Farm, and God Blesses Us with Thanksgiving – in that order. But, all of these are strong and over a long time I have filtered out MANY ugly or poor ones, even just within the thanksgiving niche!
If it’s helpful, I put all these as amazon links, so you can source them easily there! If from this list you know of one I’ve missed that sounds like we’d like please tell me!!
This post is a part of my very selective curations series of books and movies.
