sweet tooth

My elder lad insists we are still in the Christmas season, which ended this year with the Baptism of the Lord on January 10th.  Or at least, I thought so.  I had requested Lori Walburg's picture book The Legend of the Candy Cane at the library probably during Advent, but had to wait a while (as in, after the Baptism of the Lord) to check it out.  Upon reading it, the aforementioned lad declared it "very nice."  He spotted the word "confections" on one page, asked what it meant, and -- once he had a definition -- said "I like confections."

Me too.  Especially dark chocolate ones.  But I digress.

At any rate, the book really is lovely.  One bleak winter, A stranger arrives in a little town and begins working on an abandoned shop.  No one dares ask him what he's up to, but the children hope he is going to open a candy store.  Finally, one brave little girl offers to help in an effort to get the scoop.  As it comes to light by her work alongside the man that the children's hopes for a candy store will soon be met, she discovers among the confections something she's never seen before: a candy cane.  She asks the man about it, and he examines aloud the characteristics of the candy -- its shape, its colors, and their symbolism: J for Jesus when it's upside-down and the shape of a shepherd's crook when upright, red for the blood of his scourging, and white for the purity Christ can and will bestow upon us when we clothe ourselves in him. 

It's a seasonless story of Christ's redemptive love.