*Please note: This post contains affiliate links.
Christmas is coming, and if you’re not sure what to get the young ones in your lives, I have an idea for you: a great book.
That’s an idea for almost anyone on your list, really. But children’s books are a particularly special gift because meaningful stories can stick with young readers for the rest of their lives. They might help foster a love of reading. They might encourage them and inspire them as they go about their daily lives. And they might just be sweet, memorable stories.
If you want an endearing, easy-to-read, simple yet profound middle grade book—and one that also happens to take place during winter—you’ll want to check out The Poet’s Dog (Amazon Affiliate Link) by Patricia MacLachlan.
As the title implies, this one might be particularly interesting to any dog lovers you happen to be shopping for.
The Poet’s Dog is about a word-loving dog named Teddy who learned only two types of people can hear him speak: poets and children. When Teddy finds two children stranded in a snowstorm, they understand his words and follow him back to the cabin where he now lives alone.
Teddy wants to help his new friends, but he also wonders what he’ll do when they go home—especially when he can’t stop thinking about the past.
This is a short tale, but it encompasses so many great themes: friendship, heartache, overcoming loss, and best of all, the return of joy.
I love reading books about the return of joy, because we often come to places in our lives when joy feels fleeting and hard to grasp. It’s hard to feel joyful when we lose a friend, or when we’re having a hard day, or when we’re feeling lonely, or when we’ve experienced some sort of loss that changes our lives in a big way.
But stories like this remind us that joy is never lost forever—or, at least, it doesn’t have to be. We can find joy again. We can wait for it. But, even more than that, we can go after it. We can ask for it. We can pray for it.
And we can trust that joy will return.
The link below is an affiliate link for Amazon, which helps support me in creating more posts like this one!
And never forget … you are wonderfully created.
Love,
Becca
