Here is a list of Christmas reading material for your pleasure!
- Beaucoup de plats et treize desserts : le Reveillon du Noël provençal
- A Short Christmas Sermon: Keeping Christmas
- The Emperor’s Vision
- A Little Essay: Christmas-Living and Christmas-Giving
- The Doll’s Wish
- A Simple Bill of Fare for a Christmas Dinner
- The Christmas Spruce Tree
- Penmanship Practice – December 2022
- Uncle Richard’s New Year Dinner
- The Little Match Girl
- Papa Panov’s Special Christmas
- Penmanship Practice – December 2021
- It Was the Calm and Silent Night
- A Letter from Santa Claus
- God in a Cave
- Penmanship Practice – December 2020
- The Holy Night
- A Miserable Merry Christmas
- The Gift of the Magi
- Penmanship Practice – December 2019
- A Christmas Effigy – 1916 Pre-anniversary Shorthand
- The Holly Tree by Dickens in Anniversary Shorthand
- Twas the Night Before Christmas
- A Kidnapped Santa Claus
- The Elves and the Shoemaker
- All That Listens Is Not Old
- Christmas
- A Story about Hingham Toys
- Christmas with Castanets
- Christmas Toys and Where They Come From
- A Symbol of Christmas
- Christmas Bells
- Three Christmas Selections
- Wealth in Rare Christmas Seals
- Xmas Carol – 1st Gregg Edition – Published 1918
- Christmas Legends & Experiences of a Santa Claus
Carlos, Merry Christmas to you! Thank you very much for the Christmas reading. You are so kind to do this. 🙂
Same to you Silver!
And a Happy New Year to everyone!! 🙂
Does there happen to be any transcripts for some of the Christmas readings? I downloaded the Christmas Carol a few years ago and haven't gotten very far in the reading of it. Diamond Jubilee was the one I learned, so I've had the hardest time reading the pre-Anniversary or Anniversary Gregg. I finally got an Anniversary manual but still find it very hard to read all these wonderful old stories in shorthand. I get a few words down then get very lost in the translation.
Debbie, the "Christmas with castanets" story listed above is written in Simplified and I think you might find it readable? Simplified is more similar to DJ than Anniversary is.
The shorthand version of Christmas Carol contains about 40% of the original text. What you could do is use the original longhand text as a key, but you would have to find the right passages… here is a link to one plaintext copy of the original Christmas Carol
http://tinyurl.com/longhandcarol
I agree that occasional transcripts for Anni would be helpful since its increased brevity and no doubt top speed are gained at the expense of increased crypticness at least for those of us who learned later versions. However I very much appreciate the variety of versions that Carlos posts, so there is something for everyone!
I updated this post for display in WordPress.
Thanks, Carlos! Hope you had a great Christmas!
Thank you! Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and the best to all in the New Year.
Thanks for the re-post, Carlos. Happy New Year to everyone.
(By the way, I note that Linus is saying "Christmas" in Anni and "all" in DJ. I wonder what version of Gregg Charles Schultz knew. He included shorthand in several of his strips.)
You're welcome!
From what I've seen, whoever wrote the shorthand for Peanuts learned DJS (or Series 90). The reason I say that is that in one of the cartoons, the writer uses "j-mn blend" for "gentlemen": no one who learned Anniversary or Simplified would ever use that outline, given how many times the outline with the gent blend appears in the Gregg books! Whether Mr. Schultz wrote the shorthand himself, that's something I don't really know.
Things like this Peanuts cartoon pique my curiosity, so I looked up the strip that this panel came from. It was run in 1968, so the current Gregg series was DJ at the time, and not yet S90.
According to a Peanuts fan online, this is the first strip in which shorthand appears, and the only strip in which the shorthand is written by someone other than Woodstock.
The outlines are definitely DJ, not Anni or Simplified, as Carlos mentions: see the strip and look at the words "all" and "advance". Also, "sincerely" is spelled in full. But "Christmas" is abbreviated as in Anni.
Despite the great care with which the ordinary roman letters in the strip are printed, the shorthand is not very competently written: "Christmas" looks like "class", "how" looks rather like "ache", "Santa" is spelled with separate n-t instead of the nt blend, "looking" looks like "mocking" (clearly written with o instead of u), "a" looks like "at".
My guess, then, is that Schultz didn't really know shorthand, but either used a dictionary or a human source, and copied the shorthand into the strip himself. I strongly suspect a human source rather than a dictionary for two reasons: first, the errors; and second, the non-DJ forms for "Christmas" and "sincerely".
I hope this nitpicking doesn't bore all the rest of you!
I forgot to mention above that Charles Schultz apparently did all the work on the Peanuts strips alone, without assistants. So he would have been the one to letter the shorthand.
Thanks, Carlos, for putting this post back up to the front of the line. I'm going to try to read through most of them this week!
You’re welcome! I hope you enjoy the selections.
Thanks Carlos! This looks amazing to see all this reading material. Thanks for the recommendation of buying the Louis Leslie Gregg Shorthand Functional Method books too. They are easy to take with and I have been able to work on my reading some each day.
Very grateful for this group. Hope you all have had a delightful Christmas.
You're welcome! I'm glad you liked this collection.