{"id":364,"date":"2011-02-12T22:17:58","date_gmt":"2011-02-12T22:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/"},"modified":"2011-09-25T22:43:08","modified_gmt":"2011-09-25T22:43:08","slug":"jeremy%e2%80%99s-christmas-wish-%e2%80%93-about-the-book","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/books\/jeremy%e2%80%99s-christmas-wish-%e2%80%93-about-the-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeremy\u2019s Christmas Wish \u2013 About the Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Books<\/a><\/strong> <\/strong>| About the Book | Synopsis<\/a> | Questions & Activities<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>I have always loved Christmas and Christmas stories in particular. While I was working as a teacher-librarian in an elementary school in Edmonton, one of the large food-store chains presented a competition for an original Christmas story to publish in their newsletter. A fan of Charles Dickens\u2019 A Christmas Carol, I began thinking of writing a tale with some parallels. Instead of a miserly, mean old man, what if the central character was a pampered rich kid in today\u2019s world who always gets everything material that he might wish for? But he has no friends. In a few days, I\u2019d completed the story and sent it off. A couple of weeks later the manila envelope with the manuscript enclosed came back. There was a nice rejection slip, though, indicating the judges had really liked the story but it was much too long for their newsletter.<\/p>\n

For many years that followed, I pulled the manuscript out at Christmas and read it to schoolchildren and the children of family and friends gathered around our own Christmas trees at home. In the 1990s I worked as an editor for a series of early chapter books and when Hodgepog, the publishing company, moved from Edmonton to Vancouver where there would be a different editor working with the material, I sent the manuscript for them to look at. They liked the piece and agreed to publish it.<\/p>\n

At one point I had begun working on some illustrations for the story, but I knew I wouldn\u2019t have time to work up an entire series of pictures for the proposed publishing schedule so I tucked these away. Martin Rose, a teacher of film animation at Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver, was brought on board, creating stylized ink sketches that have a scratchboard feel to them. I introduced the book to a Christmas gathering of the Children\u2019s Literature Roundtable of Edmonton to a warm reception \u2013 and have read aloud from the short novel as a guest at a number of Christmas book galas following its publication.<\/p>\n

This is a book I usually share with classes in grades 2 to 4 during school and library visits \u2013 often working an illustration demonstration (using one of the schoolboys as a model for Jeremy) into my presentation.<\/p>\n

Hodgepog no longer exists as a publishing company, so contact the author directly for copies of this paperback book. ($5.95 plus shipping. Email your order to: glenhuser@shaw.ca indicating the number of copies you would like. Be sure to include your full mailing address. A bill will be included in the package.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Books | About the Book | Synopsis | Questions & Activities I have always loved Christmas and Christmas stories in particular. While I was working as a teacher-librarian in an elementary school in Edmonton, one of the large food-store chains presented a competition for an original Christmas story to publish in their newsletter. A fan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":10,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-364","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":366,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/364\/revisions\/366"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}