Confessions of an early addiction, and the clandestine activity that followed.

For many years I've kept my guilt regarding the cedar chest a secret - I felt ashamed of my lack of self-control. However, this Christmas I decided enough time had passed that I can now confess.

To begin with, I admit to being an incurable bookaholic. I always have been. One of my earliest memories is of standing behind my mother as she washed the lunch dishes, pulling on her apron strings as I begged her to read "just one chapter, please, just one chapter."

I don't recall my mother ever refusing to leave the sudsy pan, dry her hands, and follow me to the living room. We'd curl up together and while away the afternoon, deep in our love for the printed word. A devoted amateur actress, she read with passionate expression. I would listen, mesmerized, carried away on the wings of her words.

The books I remember best from those early days were the works of Thornton W. Burgess. My favourite among his loquacious animals was Reddy Fox. Reddy frequently outfoxed himself through some small flaw in one of his nefarious schemes.

When I finally learned to read on my own, I experienced one of the greatest epiphanies of my life. There was magic to be found on a printed page; words had the power to sweep me away into another time, another place, another spirit.

I read everything from the Corn Flakes box on the breakfast table to the set of university encyclopedias published in 1902, which I discovered in my grandmother's attic. (It wasn't until I couldn't find the word "airplane" that I realized the venerable age of this fascinating reading material.)

I soon wanted my own library. While other children hounded their parents for toys, I begged for books, books, and more books.

Christmas presented a paramount opportunity for my supplications. Each autumn, I prepared a long list of titles-any of which I'd be delighted to find beneath the tree. Since we had no bookstore in our town, Eaton's catalogue was the only way to purchase these desirable items. One special Sunday afternoon each November, my mother and I would sit at the kitchen table with that lovely, plump book while I selected the books I most desired from the limited selection on the two pages offering reading materials. My mother, knowing how I devoured books the moment they arrived in our home, never let me know when she was picking up the parcel at the post office. And, she never revealed where she hid the precious package.

However, I'd become sly and unscrupulous. No book could remain unread anywhere within my ability to ferret it out. Thus, one day when I was 10 and desperate for a good read, I began a quest for her hiding place. I dug through closets, into their darkest, most remote corners and topmost shelves. I burrowed under sheets and towels in the linen cupboard, and even checked beneath the mattress in the guest room. Nothing. Stymied, I followed my mother into my parents' bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. I watched as she opened the cedar chest beneath the window. My father made it for her when they got engaged, and she kept her most treasured possessions in it: her wedding gown, my christening dress, her collection of hand-embroidered linens and, anathemas to a Reddy Fox fan, a couple of fox fur capes.

I watched as she folded a pillowslip she'd finished decorating with moss roses. As she bent over the cedar chest to store her handiwork, I started to turn away. Then something caught my eye. Peeking out from beneath a lace tablecloth was the top corner of a shiny, new book.

My mother hastily lowered the lid and glanced in my direction. Had I seen it? The question mirrored in her eyes. Struggling to be nonchalant, I began to hum We Wish You a Merry Christmas as I swung my legs against the chenille bedspread, gazing up at the ceiling. She hesitated, then drew a deep breath and headed out of the room.

"Come along, Gail," she called as she started down the stairs. "We have cookies to bake." I skipped along after her, visions of how I'd invade the cedar chest later when I was alone upstairs dancing through my head.

That evening, after I'd been tucked in bed and my parents were settled in the living room listening to Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen on the radio, I slipped my bare feet out onto the cold linoleum and tiptoed across the hall. I carried a small flashlight my father had given me the previous Christmas, in case of power outages, he'd said. He'd never intended it to be used in a book burglary in his own home.

Trembling with the thrill of the forbidden, I eased open the cedar chest, slipped my hand beneath the folded linens and felt them… not the usual two but four, count them, four, slick, new books, their dust jackets as smooth as silk.

I slid out the top volume and read its title: The Secret of Shadow Ranch. It was the Nancy Drew mystery I'd asked for the past two years, but Eaton's had always sent a substitution. My breath caught in my throat.

Resting my back against the cedar chest, I sat on the floor, opened the Carolyn Keene classic to page one, adjusted my flashlight and began to read. Of course, I had to stay alert for the slightest indication that either of my parents was about to come upstairs.

Oh, the bliss of those stolen moments. My heart hammering, I read about Nancy's adventures for more than an hour. My feet felt like blocks of ice on the cold floor, I shivered in my pajamas-and I continued to read.

Then I heard my father suggesting a cup of tea before bed. I eased open the cedar chest, slid the book gently beneath the tablecloths and scuttled back to my room.

Snuggled beneath the covers with the flashlight still warm in my hand, I drifted off to sleep. Visions of Nancy Drew, Bess and George riding the range at Shadow Ranch replaced the sugarplums that were supposed to dance through my head.

In the hard light of the next morning, I admit I had a few qualms as I sat at the breakfast table and glanced over at my mother. I knew I was destroying her joy in the big surprise she would be hoping for on Christmas morning, with that long-sought-after Nancy Drew title.

I tried to admonish myself: You should be ashamed of yourself. You must never, never do it again.

Yet that night, as my parents listened to a Christmas concert broadcast from Halifax on the living room radio, I cautiously opened The Secret of Shadow Ranch to chapter five, and read on.

By the time Christmas Eve arrived, I'd devoured all four books and was contemplating rereading Shadow Ranch. No, I told myself sternly. You'll bend a page, you'll crack the spine. Quit while you're ahead.

As I unwrapped each book on Christmas morning, my enthusiasm might have been a tip-off to less trusting parents. But they flushed with my reflected delight. Both were avid readers: they understood (or believed they understood) the extent of my thirst for the printed word. Cradling my treasures in my arms, I curled up in a corner of the couch and in the glow of flickering tree lights, settled down to indulge myself in a full Christmas morning of rereading.

My clandestine activity continued during the next three Christmases. It might have gone on longer had I not made a major faux pas. My favourite author at the time was L.M. Montgomery. I'd read all of the Anne books and had been longing for one of the author's more mature stories called The Blue Castle. Not an easy book to find, it was proving as elusive as The Secret of Shadow Ranch.

But joy of joys! A week before Christmas it appeared in the cedar chest. Reading it by the light of my flashlight, I was thrilled by the courage of heroine Valancy Stirling, and identified with her need for freedom and self-expression. It was so romantic, the ending absolutely wonderful. When I finished reading it two days before Christmas, I hugged it in the darkness beside the cedar chest. Perfect, perfect little book!

On Christmas morning relatives descended on our home-it was my parents' turn to host the Yuletide dinner. One of my maternal aunts wandered into the living room to find me in my usual corner of the couch, rereading The Blue Castle.

"Well, Gail, I see you got another book." She sighed in mild exasperation.

"Yes, a perfectly lovely book." I put my finger between the pages of the first chapter to mark my place, and beamed at her.

"Another novel, no doubt," she scoffed, sitting down opposite me. "I never read anything but the newspaper myself. Those things are nothing but nonsense."

"Oh, no they aren't!" I couldn't bear to hear my beloved books defamed. "This one is about a girl who leaves home to nurse a sick friend and falls in love with the town outcast. Later she discovers he's really a millionaire, they get married and live happily ever after."

"Do they now?"

I turned to see my mother standing in the living room doorway… and my finger slipped from its place at page six. Her lips curled up into a smile. She winked and turned back into the kitchen.

My mother died three Christmases later, a victim of cancer. Her legacy to my love of literature, however, lives on in my heart and home. The Adventures of Reddy Fox, The Secret of Shadow Ranch and The Blue Castle remain beloved parts of my library.

As for the cedar chest, it sits in my living room, symbolic of those happy Christmases when a book could make my dreams come true, and a mother who understood.

Gail MacMillan is the author of a collection of Christmas stories called Yuletide Yarns, recently published by DreamCatcher, in Saint John, NB.