I Can't Believe It's 2020 and I'm Doing a Christmas Haul

Okay, okay, I know what you might be thinking: this feels a little gauche, doesn't it? You would think I would know better than to brag about the material possessions I was gifted - through the generosity, love, and family time of Christmas - especially in this, the flaming trash heap that has been 2020. 

Particularly because I haven't even managed to come up with enough regular, non-haul blogposts this year, either. You've barely gotten a glimpse at what I've been reading, let alone what I've been adding to my bookshelves! (To be fair, though, that kind of imbalance between reading and purchasing has been another constant of my 2020, too.) 

Might as well duck my head, stay a swift course, and head towards the horizon of the new year with as little fanfare as possible. Might as well keep my mouth shut until the slate is wiped clean again. 

Or... I could just tell you. 

Hang the consequences! I got cool new stuff, and I want to tell you about it! Especially because as you might have guessed, a lot of them are books. And isn't that what you kind folks are here for, anyways? 

(Plus, a lot of them were thrifted. You'll see in a minute.) 

From Sibling #1, the List Detective: Vintage Cooking and Back to Kitchen Basics  

My eldest sibling - the closest in age to me - really honed in on one of the top requests from my list: the long-sought, difficult-to-find An Everlasting Meal, from Tamar Adler. Hardcover editions of this book are practically considered modern collectibles, and I've been searching for a paperback copy to call my own since I read it for the first time last December, and my sister absolutely came through. I screamed when I opened it, and I'm already considering making it a top entry on my TBR for 2021. 

On top of that, she also picked up another request from my Christmas list, which had a pretty large focus on the intersections of agriculture, sustainability, economic responsibility, and more, so she grabbed The Good Food Revolution, by Will Allen (with Charles Wilson). Both of these titles were purchased from Powell's in Portland - one of the top bookish meccas I've missed in the past year of sheltering at home - which was basically just a gift in itself, as well. 

The place she really outdid herself, though, was in a set of books she didn't even have to pay for: Thoughts for Food, Thoughts for Buffets, and Thoughts for Festive Foods, all claimed off a "give away" stack at her girlfriend's grandmother's house. They don't contain pictures - they barely contain anything other than instructions! - but they're definitely vintage, based on the copyright stamp, as well as the fact that I can find next to no information about them online anywhere. 

From Sibling #2, the Thrifter: Value Village Superhaul 

My second youngest sibling - one who also gifted me a cute set of tortoiseshell earrings, a green frog-shaped candle, and an amber glass baking dish - felt that their present could be beefed up a little by the addition of some Value Village-sourced cookbooks, too. To be fair, I adore vintage cookbooks (as you might have surmised from this list), and the ones they picked up held a bit of surprise. 

The Chocolate Collection is really something akin to a Taste of Home cookbook, if they had partnered with M&Ms for a full third of it. While some of the recipes inside are frustratingly, well, full of M&Ms, some of them - like those for homemade pudding, no bake pies, and fanciful cheesecakes - definitely seem promising. 

They also picked up a near-perfect copy of Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukin's seminal work The Silver Palate cookbook, which is honestly a real find, and would have made for a great present, if only they hadn't fallen into the classic pitfall of knowing someone's taste perfectly: I already have a copy! Thankfully, my mom doesn't, so the cookbook has been dutifully added to her shelves, too. 

The real exciting addition to this present, though, was in the inclusion of a cookbook I've never even heard of before: The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook. I quickly realized, upon doing a little research, that the fact I had no idea what it was, was pretty embarrassing on my part. Not only was it the first cookbook to ever make the New York Times best-seller list, but it is widely considered a classic cookbook of the '60s. The founder of the Pepperidge Farm line of supermarket staples - like Goldfish, Milano cookies, and what was, in the '50s, the first refrigerated puff pastry offered on the market - uses this healthy tome as a sort of cookbook-cum-memoir, detailing her life and culinary experiences, including a chapter on cooking from "vintage" cookbooks herself! 

From Mom and Dad (and also myself): an "Aspirational Farmer" stack 

It's the classic mom-and-dad conundrum: what do you get your kids for Christmas... especially when you've got four of them, all in their adult years? The appropriate answer, I think, is to give them carte blanche on at least a couple of their presents. This is always an especially good idea when it comes to books, as it allows for the present-receiver to unwrap their own deliberate selections... as well as source them from the most cost-responsible retailers possible. All it takes is an hour or two surfing Book Outlet, and voila: a stack of books for your kid for Christmas, for under $30. Everybody wins! 

So, thank you, Mom and Dad, for this exciting new selection of reads, pretty much dedicated to the small patch of land I keep in our backyard, whose reinvigoration I am already looking forward to in April. The titles I picked out: 

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, Novella Carpenter

The New Farm: Our Ten Years on the Front Lines of the Good Food Revolution, Brent Preston 

The Everything Backyard Farming Book, Neil Shelton

Grow What You Love: 12 Plant Food Families to Change Your Life, Emily Murphy 

Grow Cook Eat, Willi Galloway

The one small outlier on this list, is a different sort of mental focus, but still in keeping along the same vein: Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 a Day, by Leanne Brown. I originally heard about this book on an episode of the Dinner Sisters podcast this Fall, and really loved not only the recipes highlighted from the book itself, but also, the message behind the publication: Brown developed the concept during her Masters in Food Policy at Brown, and it was written in order to provide a free PDF of nutritional inspiration for those on very tight budgets, particularly the SNAP program of food stamp benefits. After the free download became a viral sensation, the print run was funded primarily through a successful Kickstarter project, with every purchase making another available to a family in need. It became the #1 cookbook ever funded on Kickstarter, and then quickly progressed to a New York Times bestseller during its second print run. In total, according to Leanne Brown's website, "over 96,000 printed copies of Good and Cheap to people in need," and "have also sold more than 115,000 copies" to low-income family groups and organizations "at huge discount." 

From my Younger Brother, the Reader: Filling in Some Blank Shelf Space... in a Big Way 

Earlier in 2020 - shortly after Covid shuttered his senior year of high school early, which also brought an end to the typical seven-to-ten hours a day he spent there - I finally relinquished a bit of a grasp on my bookshelves, and decided that it was time to let my then-18-year-old brother try his hand at reading some Tamora Pierce. 

What I didn't expect, was how quickly he'd make his way through her entire canon... including, surprisingly, the books of hers I'd never actually wound up reading myself. 

One of such series was the Alanna books, her first of their kind in the Tortall Universe. While I'd originally tried to read them in my early twenties, I did so only after I'd already fallen in love with Kel, Ali, and Beka... and unfortunately, it was pretty difficult to get into her earlier works, when I'd been reading so much more of her contemporary series. So, I passed on the rest of them, and simply contented myself to rereading Beka Cooper: Terrier for the sixth or seventh time. 

This did not work for my brother, who very quickly thereafter, insisted on filling out the rest of my collection for me, bestowed with the promise that I'd do my best to quickly catch up "to his level." I can't tell you exactly how I felt in having my eight-years-younger brother call me a "fake fan" of one of my longest literary obsessions, but it wasn't great, and I'm looking forward to reading as much Pierce as I can in the new year. 

While the Alanna books were a welcome collection to add to my already-bursting shelves, they also weren't the only reads my brother thought it was important to give me for Christmas. Not when another one of the requests on my list looked so alluring, too. 

You might have seen one of these boxes floating around on BookTube earlier this year: a collection of twenty titles, purchased wholesale from a warehouse of backlisted mass-market-paperback romance novels, for about $25. Who could resist such temptation, right? Especially, of course, when you would get to choose the theme of what came inside the box, too. 

But there's a lot more information for that one to come later... mainly because I'm still mentally processing all of the abs on these covers, myself. So hang on for a couple of days, and I'll give you an update, on how exactly I reacted when I saw that my brother had bought me a box of twenty backlisted Paranormal Fantasy romance novels. 

What fun reads did you find under your tree? Got any cool plans for any giftcards you got? Let me know, in the comments below!