Christmas on Jane Street: A True Story
Billy Romp, Wanda Urbanska
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0061626422
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The warm, wonderful, real-life tale of the family that brings the Christmas spirit to life on a street corner in Manhattan.
Every holiday season for nearly twenty years, Billy Romp, his wife, and their three children have spent nearly a month living in a tiny camper and selling Christmas trees on Jane Street in New York City. They arrive from Vermont the day after Thanksgiving and leave just in time to make it home for Christmas morning—and for a few weeks they transform a corner of the Big Apple into a Frank Capra-esque small town alive with heartwarming holiday spirit.
Christmas on Jane Street is about the transformative power of love—love of parent and child, of merchant and customer, of stranger and neighbor. The ideal Christmas story, it is about the lasting and profound difference that one person can make to a family and one family can make to a community.
A lovely, lovingly illustrated little gem of a book, this delightful tenth anniversary edition of a beloved Christmas classic tells the poignant, inspiring story of an unforgettable family and the warm, wide circle of friends who have welcomed them to the neighborhood.
them toward the most popular Christmas tree, the Balsam fir. If, however, they want a subtler, sweeter smell, I recommend my personal favorite—the Douglas fir. If they desire a sophisticated tree, tall and regal with strong stiff branches that won’t bow under the weight of heavy ornaments, I trumpet the king of trees—the Fraser fir. This royal never sheds. “Leave it up till Easter!” I tease. I’ve found that with customers—as with life itself—spirit matters as much as, if not more than, the
music. Seventeen now, Henry is a damn good bass player, a motorcyclist, and a wild man. Timmy is a hunter and an all-around outdoorsman. He’s thirteen, a charmer, and quite possibly the smartest of the bunch. When Christmas on Jane Street came out, it was pretty exciting for a while. We had our fifteen minutes of fame and all that. Soon we settled back into a life in Vermont much as it was before. Every now and then someone recognizes my name and says, “Did you write that book? I loved that
We slathered these with creamery butter and our homemade blueberry or blackberry jam from Vermont. At lunch, she whipped up some heavenly soup or stew, often using leftovers from the previous evening. Dinner was generally lasagna or a casserole, homemade bread, and cooked vegetables. Occasionally, as a special treat, she served fish or venison. For dessert, Patti made pies, cakes, and cookies. Her specialties were apple crisp, gingerbread, and oatmeal-raisin and Christmas cookies. With pleasant
look even better than it did now. Henry wanted to know if I would have chosen that particular one. He asked me that afternoon when we were setting the corner tree in its stand. I put him off by asking him what he thought. We had tied the top of the tree to the DON’T WALK/WALK sign so that wind wouldn’t topple it. I had added an adapter to the string of overhead lights to accommodate the lights for the corner tree. “So, Dad,” he persisted over dinner. “Would you have chosen that tree?” “I might
like long-lost sisters. The two boys, Henry and Lucie, picked up where they left off the year before: racing around the corner to scope out the new secret hideouts. The girls smiled and beamed at each other for a long time before settling into a session of serious girl talk. Occasionally, almost as an afterthought, they reached for a piece of popcorn or hung an ornament; but it was clear that the main thing was each other. Though I stayed busy filling our guests’ cups with cider and making small