This is a perfect matching of subject and author, for what time of the year evokes more wistful nostalgia than Christmas, and who is more skillful at evoking childhood's innocent sensuality, the basis of that nostalgia? Taylor's charm-drenched memoir never, despite its sugarplumminess, cloys or becomes saccharine. Its chapters are like late-Victorian holiday cards, festive and cheerful and replete with natural symbols. We meet the Christmas geese, before and after plucking (the actual foul play takes place offstage, in the basement, where Mom handles the butchery). Silent, skinny Black Ned comes to sweep the chimney, precipitating an orgy of house cleaning and decorating. The family traipses through the blackthorn hedges to find the perfect branches. Mail from far-off America arrives, sometimes bearing curious presents. The family gathers around the sweet turf fire, raises glasses, and cheers in the New Year. These are holidays as everyone wishes they could remember them. --Patricia Monaghan

Taylor (To School Through the Fields) has written a memoir of a County Kerry Christmas as seen through her own nine-year-old eyes. First there is the fattening of the pet-like geese. Their execution and plucking follows. Then the countdown to Christmas begins: waiting for the ``master'' to let the children know when the school holiday is to begin; the letters to Santa; the preparation of the Christmas chimney for Santa by the sweep, Black Ned; the hunt for holly; the housing of the farm animals for the winter; and the house cleanup in readiness for the big day. Finally, Christmas arrives with mass and a ``Happy Birthday'' to the infant Jesus. The holiday ends with the hunt for the wren-bird one day later on St. Stephen's Day. With liberal sprinkling of the Irish language, neighbor Mrs. Casey's tales of supernatural Christmases past and the family's thought of soft barm bracks, Taylor has written a tender remembrance of a simpler, yet harder, time past. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved