For many of us, Thanksgiving has been a time when family members far and wide gather together, with as many people and as much food crammed around the dinner table as we can fit. Ah, the good old days! Thanksgiving may look a little different this year, when social distancing and travel restrictions can put a damper on social gatherings. Never fear! We’ve put together some Thanksgiving-themed reading to help keep your holiday spirit going, even if you’re celebrating from a distance.
For Kids:
- The Thankful Book by Todd Parr
- Balloons over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade by Melissa Sweet
- Arthur’s Thanksgiving by Marc Brown
- 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving by Catherine O’Neill Grace and Margaret M. Bruchac
- Sharing the Bread : An Old-fashioned Thanksgiving Story by Pat Zietlow Miller
- Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano
- I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie by Alison Jackson
- Junie B. Jones, First Grader : Turkeys We Have Loved and Eaten (and other thankful stuff) by Barbara Park
For Adults:
- Thanksgiving by Janet Evanovich
- Overkilt by Kaitlyn Dunnett
- The Ramblers by Aidan Donnelley Rowley
- A Fatal Feast : A Murder, She Wrote Mystery by Jessica Fletcher & Donald Bain
- The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
- A Quilter’s Holiday by Jennifer Chiaverini
- Bittersweet by Susan Wittig Albert
- Thanksgiving : How to Cook it Well by Sam Sifton
When the 
Enola Holmes is the much younger sister of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes, whom she admires but rarely sees. Raised by her mother in a very unconventional way, and often left to her own devices for extended periods of time, Enola has a skill set not normally found in young ladies of her era, with a particular talent for cryptology. In 1900, on her 14th birthday, her mother mysteriously disappears, leaving coded clues behind. Enola sets out to solve the mystery of her disappearance, much to the consternation of her brothers, who want to put her into boarding school and make a proper lady out of her. She is in hiding from them for most of the series, and it’s fun to watch Enola outsmart the brothers who think themselves so much smarter than her.
Flavia de Luce is an 11-year-old girl in 1950 who lost her mother when she was a baby. She lives with her largely-absent father and two annoying older sisters on an English country estate that’s seen better days. Flavia’s upbringing is also quite unconventional, and she spends much of her time indulging her passion for chemistry, becoming quite an expert in poisons through the many experiments she conducts in her laboratory. Flavia’s obsession with the gruesome and deadly along with her need to get to figure out why things happen is a by-product of losing her mother at such an early age; indeed Harriet de Luce remains a presence in the sad little family throughout the series. While this could be maudlin, it is never overdone, and Flavia’s determination to make sense of events in the world around her drives everything she does. She is the definition of “pluck”.
Ah, it’s October. We’re all reaching for our big thick cardigans (at least, that’s what we librarians are doing), admiring the mums and pumpkins at the local nurseries, and wondering why pie spices keep showing up in places they don’t belong. But if you’re anything like me, you’re more intent on finding something more than that chilly evening wind to send a shiver down your spine. Yep. I’m talking horror stories.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
In a Dark, Dark Room
Eerie Elementary
The Jumbies
City of Ghosts
The Girl in the Locked Room
The Peculiar Incident on Shady Street
Scary Stories for Young Foxes
Ghosts
Small Spaces
The Song from Somewhere Else
When a new dog-proof garbage can arrived in a box larger than my three year old, it became her favorite toy of the month, and for one of the weeks we turned it into a pirate ship. Anything that keeps a bored three year old busy for a week deserves to be bronzed. We hung a garden flag from a broom handle for a sail, used a brass fastener to make a spinning wheel, dug out costumes from the older kids, watched a lot of preschool pirate videos and read a lot of pirate books. I drew a simple outline map of our living room and taught her to read maps by placing candy in various places as treasure, and marking X on the map. By the third candy, she was proficient on her own. Then we built our finale.
Using balloons, some Cheshire Herald strips, and a little watered down Elmer’s Glue, we made some cannon balls, and then painted them the next day. Then we built our cannon. The cannon balls were about 5 ½ inches, too big for a standard paper tube. But they worked just perfectly for a paint can! So we scavanged a paint can from the garage, which, thankfully, had only an inch of dried paint in the bottom. And these new-fangled plastic paint cans? The paint doesn’t stick! A few taps and peels, and all that dead paint came falling 
right out. A quick rinse, and we were good. I cut the bottom off with my Ginsu knife (a product that has lived up to every claim ever made on it – thirty years later it still cuts fences AND tomatoes, and plastic paint cans). I strung a piece of waistband elastic across the hole, held tight by Gorilla Tape, and we had our cannon. It was tricky getting the right angle, but pull the elastic back far enough with the cannon ball sitting on it, and we could get the ball to shoot four or five feet, which is plenty inside a house.
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