All Aboard for Christmas

by Christopher Jennison

A collection of nostalgic holiday stories, poems, and pictures evokes the sentiments of bygone Christmases in the era of train travel, in an anthology that includes such pieces as vintage magazine covers from The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as original Lionel Train advertisements. 25,000 first printing.

Genres: Christmas, Trains

128 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2004

Reviews

[Roger Briggs]

The age of the iron horse, steam and diesel engines has been fading quickly. Fortunately "All Aboard for Christmas" captures the history and flavor if not remnants of their disappearing future. In my brief 75 years of occasional experience and love affair with all things "train", I have experienced the excitement of a Lionel train at Christmas time and the "Home for Christmas" trip on a winter's night train into a snowy moonlit night past homes ablaze with holiday anticipation arriving in morning's light to celebrate Christmas with family and friends. Boys and trains are inseparable even for one as old as I. But for girls, what can you say. Maybe it is a welcome relief for mothers and daughters to have the male folk so easily distracted. Yet some of those families have "train-life" in their blood, grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers, sons grandsons who are train engineers, trainmen, brakemen, conductors, ticket agents, etc, and there is an unmistakable pride in the family, both "girls" and "boys", in romancing the rails. My wife Sharon's family pretty much have been and are engaged in the life of railroads and trains. Her brother Don, a brakeman, once against company rules allowed me to ride a freight engine "up-front" watching the track ahead, green block, red block, and looking back on curves at the track behind and the cars following in neat order, a thrill of a lifetime for me. I had a moment or so after that of imagining myself working for the railroad instead of the college educated work for which I had prepared. It was a brief moment but a longing and glorious one.

[Rosa Cline]

Wow! This was such a nostalgic book! Trains aren't as big deal as they used to be. But for my age group we don't very rarely see trains except for those moving grain or things like that. Not travel trains like back in the 40's and 50's. In all the old movies we see people riding trains or children playing with trains. This book takes one back; listening to stories of people who have those magical memories of riding trains and during the holiday seasons. It also gives History of trains the manufacturers and things like that. I really enjoyed reading this and seeing some of the old advertisements that was everywhere years ago. Things that was very real to our grandparents and will be non existence for our grandbabies but this book has captured at least some of those memories!

[Emmanuel Nevers]

Really well done celebration of the connection between trains and Christmas.