It was about a mile and a half to Breton Downs School, which Chris walked to every day and attended until 6th grade, when the Van Allsburg family moved again. There remained many open fields and streams and ponds where a boy could catch minnows and frogs, or see a firefly at night. When Chris was three years old, his family moved to a new house at the edge of Grand Rapids that was part of a development a kind of planned neighborhood, that was still being built.
Chris’s father ran the dairy with Chris’s three uncles after his grandfather Peter retired. But by 1949, the house was surrounded by buildings and other houses. It was a very old house that, like the little house in Virginia Lee Burton’s story, had once looked over farmland. When Chris was born, his family lived in an old farm house next door to the large brick creamery building. It was named East End Creamery and after they bottled the milk (and made the other products) they delivered it to homes all around Grand Rapids in yellow and blue trucks. His sister Karen was born in 1947.Ĭhris’s paternal grandfather, Peter, owned and operated a creamery, a place where milk was turned into butter, cream, cottage cheese, and ice cream. 'The Polar Express' evokes the same sense of mystery as his previous imaginative books 'The Garden of Abdul Gasazi' (1979), 'Jumanji' (1981), and 'The Wreck of the Zephyr' (1983).Īwarded the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1986, 'The Polar Express 'has sold more than 7 million copies, become a classic holiday movie, and been translated into stage productions that take place across the United States during the holiday season.Ĭhris was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan on June 18, 1949, the second child of Doris Christiansen Van Allsburg and Richard Van Allsburg. In strange and moving shades of full color art, Chris Van Allsburg creates an otherwordly classic of the Christmas season. The mother of the boy admires the bell, but laments that it is broken-for you see, only believers can hear the sound of the bell. On Christmas morning, the boy finds the bell under the tree. The boy modestly asks for one bell from the harness of the reindeer. When he arrives, Santa offers the boy any gift he desires. Late one Christmas Eve after the town has gone to sleep, the boy boards the mysterious train that waits for him: the Polar Express bound for the North Pole. “Seeing is believing, but sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can't see.”
0 kommentar(er)
