Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2020 i Cricket Magazine Fiction and Non-Fiction Stories for Children and Young Teens

Dear Cricket and Everybuggy, Hi! I’m a female boy scout and I love dancing, music, and animals. I also love this magazine. I have been getting it since I was eight! I’m the oldest of three and I have a dog named Copper, a leopard gecko named Leppy, and two chickens of my own for pets. I’m homeschooled, and my favorite subject is social studies. I’m also very interested in art and I like to draw and read a lot. I also do soccer and I’m thinking about karate. Savannah, age 12 Waynesville, North Carolina Hi, Everybuggy! Based upon letters I’ve read in the Letterbox, I think I’m the second person to say that I’m the trillionth person to say that I’m the trillionth person to say that I love…

Part 3 Wandering around after school one day, Jamie finds herself in an unfamiliar part of town. Lost and with night falling, she follows a white cat up to a rundown house filled with valuable antiques. An old man named Eddy lives there, and over tea and cakes, he tells her that he’s a time traveler. He says he brought the treasures back from his travels and that Caesar, the white Persian cat, accompanied him home from his first journey. When Jamie gets up to leave, Eddy says that he would be glad if she came to see him again. He gives her money so she can call home from a pay phone at a gas station, but she later realizes that he’s given her two ancient Roman coins. She…

IN 1863, PRESIDENT Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation stating that Thanksgiving Day would be observed on the last Thursday of November. This tradition continued for 76 years, until 1939. That year, November had five Thursdays, causing Thanksgiving Day to fall on the fifth Thursday, November 30, only three weeks before Christmas. That August, many business groups urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving Day up a week, allowing more time for Christmas shoppers to boost sales. “It is an established fact that Christmas buying begins vigorously every year in the retail stores the day following Thanksgiving and that the Thanksgiving to Christmas period is the busiest retail period of the whole year,” read a letter to the president from the Downtown Association of Los Angeles. Many more letters followed…

AT THIS TIME of year, as people around the world celebrate holidays of light and hope, such as Hannukah, Diwali, Kwanza, and Christmas, one of my favorite traditions is to reread A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. You likely know the story of the old miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who after being visited by the three spirits of Christmas, finds new life and joy in being kind and generous to the poor, especially the lame boy Tiny Tim. In one memorable scene, the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge two ragged children hiding beneath his cloak. “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want,” he warns. “Beware them both . . . but most of all beware this boy . . . ” That scene came to mind when I learned…

WHEN I WAS a little girl, I thought my mother’s name was Yuki, which means snow. That was part of her name, but I didn’t learn the rest of it until the night my father died. My mother left us on a slate-gray evening when I was five, with her namesake falling from the sky and piled high around the windows and doors. Awakened by raised voices, I watched through a tear in the curtain that shielded my sleeping mat as my mother wrapped her limbs in a shining, white kimono. As far back as I could remember, she had always worn the dark wool shifts that all mountain people wear, spun from the hair of the half-mad goats that give us milk and cheese. In her kimono she looked…

The Mysterious Howling (The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, Book 1) by Maryrose Wood Miss Penelope Lumley has a job as a governess for three unordinary children. Well, not exactly children. The people of Ashton Place assume that they were raised by wolves. Suddenly, Lady Constance announces that she is going to have a Christmas party. Will Penelope train the children in time? I recommend this series for ages nine to adult. Claire Swender, age 9 Marshall, Michigan Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis Bud is a ten-year-old boy who doesn’t have a mother. He is tired of being an orphan, so he goes by himself to find family. Bud had some hard times in the 1930s looking for food and shelter. After a long night, a nice man…

IT DOESN’T SEEM that long ago, the Christmas of my eighth birthday. We had recently moved to 194 Poplar Street in New Haven, Connecticut. It was our sixth move that year. Our new home was a four-room apartment on the second floor of a rundown Victorian house. We shared a bathroom at the end of the hall with three other families. It was 1939, and the Great Depression had made all our lives much harder. We were poor, we knew it. But we didn’t know how poor we were until our father sat my sisters and me down on the couch in our living room to have a talk. I will always remember the sad look in Father’s eyes as he stared down at his hands, rubbing them back and…

Midnight is a little rescue cat whose original owners reluctantly had to leave her behind when they moved away from England. She has come to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, a kindly older couple with a large house in the country. Midnight has a number of adventures with the Joneses and the other cats they’ve adopted, including a big ginger cat named The Colonel, two beautiful Siamese cats named Lucy and Sally, their house cats Jeremy and Jemimah, and an aging street cat missing half an ear, Scotty. MIDNIGHT WAS HAPPILY settled with her new family when some strange things began happening. Mrs. Jones was singing funny songs about someone called Santa Claus, and Mr. Jones kept muttering Ho! Ho! Ho! in a deep voice. What did it…

WINNERS JULY 2020 ART CONTEST Dream Vacation First prize 10 and under Olivia Vessey, age 9 Chapel Hill, NC First prize 11 and up Julia Mills, age 12 Gulf Breeze, FL First prize 11 and up Carley Osterman, age 12 Morton, IL Country Concert at Red Rock, Colorado Second prize 10 and under Sarah Edwards, age 10 Richardson, TX Second prize 10 and under Steven Johnson, age 10 Lynwood, WA Green Hill Bay Second prize 11 and up Mary Clare Draganowski, age 13 West St. Paul, MN Schoenstatt: A Beautiful Place Second prize 11 and up Sophia Madey, age 13 Craryville, NY The Top of the World Sunrise Over the Alps Third prize 10 and under Satti Gray, age 9 Atlanta, GA Under the Ocean Third prize 10 and under…