**Firewood and Christmas Potatoes compares to my mother’s potato soup—made with real and instant potatoes. This story is both fact (real potatoes) and fiction (instant potatoes). The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression were real. My grandmother, mother, aunts, and uncle, along with millions of people, endured hardships during this American tragedy. My grandmother, with her children, left the desiccated plains of Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl; their travels led them to a farm labor camp in California. Grandma worked in the cotton fields of the Central Valley; she and my mother shared what little they had to help others, as others did with them. Names of characters were changed to protect all identities. Any resemblance to actual events, places, persons (living or dead), is entirely coincidental or fictional.
The hardest times can teach the greatest lessons.
During the 1930s, eight-year-old, Delia, along with her four siblings and mother, leave the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma. Taking only a few belongings and using the last of the money to buy a two-headed axe, Delia’s mother (Momma) travels to California to find work in the agricultural fields-tomatoes, grapes, cotton-anything that would support her family during the Great Depression. While confronting severe poverty, young Delia brings to life her mother’s morals: hard work, sharing, and all need to know they are loved.
Firewood and Christmas Potatoes is based on true events and will take the young reader to a time when approximately three million Americans (including children) were once considered worthless migrants, many unwelcomed as they journeyed to a different state to begin a new life. The young reader will experience the life of a child similar in age, who encountered challenges and embraced hardship by allowing their heart to love all. Firewood and Christmas Potatoes is a heartwarming story that will become a family favorite during the holiday season.
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