Books in Traditional Tales from Around the World series

A Ukrainian Celebration of New Life in Christ Children love coloring Easter eggs, and here's a story to explain one of the origins of this tradition. In early nineteenth-century Ukraine, Christians celebrated Easter by exchanging colorful, hand-decorated pysanky eggs---but with Papa away at the war and Mama struggling to make ends meet, Anya's family was too poor to buy eggs to decorate one year. That is, until Anya discovered an abandoned nest of goose eggs and began planning an Easter surprise for her family. But God had an even better surprise in store, and when the eggs unexpectedly began to hatch, Anya learned what the Easter story teaches: spring brings gifts of myriad new beginnings, just as the risen Christ gave the gift of new life to us all. Each Traditions of Faith book features a story of how significant Christian traditions emerged in cultures around the world, with a note about the origin and history of the tradition, and offers ideas and activities each family can adopt as its own.

For millennia, Somalia has been crossed and recrossed by camel caravans of merchants, bringing with them stories such as "The Good Prince," in which a kindhearted prince conquers the evil magic of a beautiful sorceress, and "The Ogress and the Snake," a Somali Hansel and Gretel story about five little girls, abandoned in the desert, who take refuge in the house of a man-eating ogress. Elizabeth Laird heard many of these tales in Jigjiga, the capital of Ethiopia's Somali region. She gathers together the finest of them in The Ogress and the Snake and Other Stories from Somalia. The stories abound with colorful characters — Deya Ali, the greedy trickster fox; Kabaalaf the shopkeeper, crooked as a jug-handle, who meets his match in the slippery Hirsi; and the miraculous (and bodyless) Head, whose magic powers conjure up a talking camel and bring him a princess. These and the other magical tales in this delightful collection are the perfect introduction to a fascinating and little-known country.

Little children throughout the world wait impatiently for Christmas to arrive. As parents know, it can seem as if the days just crawl by. Now your family can learn and put to use Advent traditions from the country of Germany during the Christmas season. No doubt mothers have long been inventing ways to keep young children occupied during the Advent season---like Gerhard Lang's mother, who in the mid-1800s helped her young son count the days on a calendar of cookies. In 1908, the grownup Gerhard, a printer, created the first commercial Advent calendar, twenty-four tiny pictures in the form of a calendar, from his fond memories. Waiting for Christmas tells the story of the young Gerhard---a story children everywhere will recognize as their own---and teaches us that we must wait patiently as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus.