Christmas stories and legends have always meant a great deal to Elizabeth Yates.  In Once in the Year she retells in her own way two of the oldest of the Christmas legends—that of the flowering forest and that of the animals at midnight.  Giving one a present day setting and adaptation and the other a setting reminiscent of an earlier day, she has woven them both into a single compelling story.  Perhaps it is a fantasy, but it is a fantasy that will be warmly cherished for, as it is told, it might have happened; it might indeed happen to the reader of the book on this or any Christmas Eve for no time of all the year is more alive with wonder and never is the imagination and the heart more ready to respond.  As, in the story, Martha's mother says to her when a little girl and she, in turn, says to her own son:  "When something wonderful happens to people on Christmas Eve, it is to be cherished in the heart and in the mind.  We must not be afraid of the wonderful things, nor must we let others laugh them away from us.  Only thus do we learn to hold our dreams.

The characters in the story are the beloved ones of Mountain Born—Peter and his father and mother, old Benj who is always so understanding and the black lamb who has grown to be the leader of the flock.  Events such as these might happen anywhere; but it is possible—and Nora Unwin's beautiful and sensitive accompanying drawings make it seem probable—that the story is set somewhere in the New England countryside where hills roll gently up to the sky and the valleys between hold little white villages and tidy farms.

From the dust jacket