When all the emphases in morning newscasts are on Black Friday, holiday menus, celebrity sightings, and even my favorite college football, I’m concerned that we are forgetting about things that matter even more. Mental pictures of innocent children caught in the path of bombs and Ukrainians who have fled their homes crowd out of my mind the biggest bargains at the largest sales.

I suggested this book in a post way back in November 2016 and have been thinking of it again this year. Sharing the Bread by Pat Zietlow Miller is billed as an old-fashioned Thanksgiving picture book.

I’m no Nikki Grimes, but I decided to have my own turn with a tanka. It’s kind of like a kid who watches Eli Manning throw the long football touchdown pass for the Giants on Sunday afternoon and then goes out in the backyard to practice passing with his brother.

The setting for Garvey in the Dark by Nikki Grimes will seem familiar to today’s readers who have experienced all of Covid and its fallout. Looking ahead to future readers, it will become historical and give a picture of the great pandemic to generations to come who did not live through it.

Procrastination came up in a recent conversation, and there were several practitioners. Some of them were even good friends. Okay, judging by their responses, you can procrastinate all the time, and it’s not that deadly.

In the final of three blogs prompted by the “Getting There” article in Smithsonian magazine, I think about those who had no bus at all – neither the yellow one with a lengthy ride on which I did homework nor the farm wagon converted to school transportation ridden by my mother. Two favorite writers reached into the truth of their ancestors to produce fiction that tells this story well.

Whether or not you recall my promise back in September to give a review of The Little Princesses after I had reread it, I remember, and you get it today. The book was written by Marion Crawford, who was the governess to Elizabeth and Margaret, and published in serial fashion in magazines in the 1950s where I read it in Mama’s Ladies Home Journal.

In my second blog about those school buses, I go back in time to a not quite school bus era. My mother, also named Virginia, started to school as a six-year-old – anxious to learn to read and equally anxious not to draw any attention to herself.

Having spent almost a fourth of my life in Louisiana, Sarah Guillory’s middle grade novel, Nowhere Better Than Here enticed me. Jillian Robichaux loves her home with bayou sunsets, a story-telling grandmother, and interacting with the nature she finds in the coastal town of Boutin.

The current issue of Smithsonian with an article called, “Getting There” about those yellow school buses triggered some thoughts and memories. In new information, I learned that the now standard color was first known as National School Bus Chrome and later called National School Bus Glossy Yellow.

Heather B. Moore sets her book, In the Shadow of a Queen, in the time of Queen Victoria. The novel is based on the life of Victoria’s fourth daughter and sixth child, Princess Louise, using original sources research. The princess has a reputation of being the most beautiful and most talented child of Victoria and Albert.

Maybe it’s just me, but my feeling is that life is picking up where it left off pre-pandemic. This week’s already filled calendar was augmented with a little bit of this and a little bit of that thrown in all the cracks. Next week’s calendar portends a similar week.

Eighth grader Ginny Shepard, in Sara St. Antoine’s new book Front Country, falls prey to a sudden obsession that overshadows the rest of her life. She falls in love with the most adorable animal she has ever seen, the pika, and then learns that it may not survive in the midst of climate change.

I give thanks today for an aunt who kept old family pictures, a cousin who knew how to put them on a thumb drive, and a daughter who knew how to take them off and send them to me. Included is this cherished picture of lifelong friends who became my great-grandmothers.

As she has done before, Kristina McMorris takes us back into historical fiction with her new book, The Ways We Hide. Her first chapter begins in Brooklyn, New York in 1942 as Fenna Vos becomes disenchanted with her partner in her magic act.

My introduction to this blog has an abject apology to Laura Numeroff, who did a much more enchanting list with, “If you give a mouse a cookie.”

Elizabeth Strout returns to my favorite fictional divorced couple in Lucy by the Sea. It is not necessary, though it would be a lot of fun, to read the previous two books in what could be loosely termed a trilogy with this couple whose friendship comes and goes long after their marriage is over.

In her book that I read recently, Katherine Paterson tells the story of her short experience in teaching. When she had no problems with a class that had previously caused great difficulty to a strong authoritarian male teacher, one of the students gave this explanation, “She had this Look. When she fixed it on you, you knew to stop what you were doing and straighten up.”

In an updated adult version of a book published by Dial Books for Young Readers in 2014, Westminster John Knox Press brings us Stories of My Life, by Katherine Paterson. It has differences and similarities to a memoir.

As I have been glued to the screen watching the ceremonies that have surrounded Queen Elizabeth II’s death, I have found it remarkable how many common people have related personally to her – many of them not even British. I count myself in this group – about as common as they come and not British.