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[GWL]: Christmas BMS

Here's a literary take on women at Christmas, which shows the situation to be the same more than 100 years ago, well BMS (Before Martha Stewart).
 
The following is from a story I wrote several years ago for the Hamilton Spectator about stuff for gardeners to read in winter. Anyway, if you haven't read the book mentioned below, it's terrific. Merry Christmas and the best of the season to you all. Now, I've got presents to wrap and baking to do...
 
-Yvonne Cunnington, Ancaster, Ont.
 
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If I had to pick a favorite winter read, it would be the charming Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a hybrid novel/memoir published anonymously in 1898 and reprinted by Virago Press in 1985. The author, Elizabeth von Arnim—said to be one of the finest wits of her day—was born in Australia, but grew up in England. In 1890, she married a German count, satirically, but affectionately portrayed in the book as "the Man of Wrath". 

 Unhappy in Berlin, von Arnim welcomed the move to her husband's remote Prussian country estate. There she began to reclaim a derelict garden and to write what would become the first of 21 books. With warmth and wit, she describes the running of the rambling estate, the care and feeding of three young daughters, husband and inevitable houseguests—but, most of all, she dwells on the making of her beloved garden. 

 Like many a modern gardener, she drops everything when the garden catalogues arrive in December. Poring over the catalogue offerings, "acquires an additional charm," von Arnim writes, "when you know you ought to be doing something else, that Christmas is at the door, that children and servants and farm hands depend on you for their pleasure, and that, if you don't see to the decoration of the trees and house and the buying of the presents, nobody else will." 
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