Bunting, Eve  
December  
Publisher: San Diego, New York 1997.
Near Fine with no dust jacket; New book with light edge wear from being on display. Harcourt, Brace & Company Later Printing Paperback 12mo 7" - 7½" tall; Unpaginated pages; Illustrated by David Diaz. Simon lives with his mother in a house they made themselves (probably out of old boxes.) It is Christmas Eve, and they have tried to make their small home festive. But they don't light their candle, for fear they might start a fire. Simon tells how they sleep: "I lie beside Mom under the heavy coat she says once belonged to my dad. The streetlight shimmers on our Christmas angel. She is a page torn from a calendar that we've pinned to the wall. Her name is December."

Just as they are settled for the night, there is a thumping at the door. An old woman is there, and wants to come in from the cold and sleep under their roof. They offer her the coat to wrap up in. And though it is very hard for him to sacrifice the cookie he has collected soda cans to buy, he offers it to the hungry woman, who gratefully eats it. "It's warm in here, " the old woman says. She smiles. "It's warm with love." Simon falls asleep. In the morning, the woman has disappeared. But when he goes to close the still-open door, he sees the angel, December, who "takes a step backward, folding her wings like a great shining moth.. It's foggy outside. I look up and there is our angel, her wings fanned to cover our cardboard house, and she's singing, so softly I can hardly hear her."

Simon is not sure what is really happening, or if he's been dreaming. But everything in their lives seemed to change after that. And Simon tells of a later Christmas Eve, when his mother has had a job since summer and they have moved into a real apartment in the projects. They have a small Christmas tree, but on its branches still hang what they had hung on that other Christmas Eve -- a toy soldier, a slivery spoon, the beads Simon once found on the sidewalk, and the crumpled rose the old woman had removed from her hat and hung on a branch herself on that past Christmas Eve. December still hangs on their wall, and Simon says "if you look ral closely you can see she has a faded rose in her hair. "; ISBN: 0152024220

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