Christmas at Eagle Pond

In December of 1940, twelve-year-old Donnie (aka Donald Hall) gets on a train from his comfortable Connecticut home to fulfill a dream; to spend Christmas with his grandparents on their farm on Eagle Pond in south central New Hampshire. Once there, he settles into the routines he knows well from his summer visits; helping Gramps milk the cows, gathering eggs from the henhouse, chopping wood for the Glenwood in the kitchen. Spoiler alert: it never happened. Donald never did make it up to Eagle pond for Christmas. But he knew all the stories from his mother and his grandparents. As he claims, "I knew all the people in this book. I remember how they talked." and surely you can trust our former Poet Laureate to tell the truth, for, now in his eighties, and having lived in that same house of his grandparents since 1975, he is in the perfect position to give himself "the thing I most wanted, a childhood Christmas at Eagle Pond."