December is National Stress-Free Family Holiday Month as well as Safe Toys and Gifts Month. The pace and excitement of winter holidays—the shopping, visits with friends and family, celebrations, and gift-giving—can stress the very ones we want to have the best time—the children. Your Timberland libraries are offering a few seasonal tips:

Keep a variety of general and seasonal books and children’s magazines in the car and take a short book break between errands. Read a book or chapter aloud any time you and the children have to wait for an appointment or the start of an event. Keep the reading choices fresh by stopping often at your library.

Read aloud to the whole family before the children’s bedtime and talk about the stories and pictures. It’s a great way for everyone to wind down at the end of the day. At the same time, you’ll create shared memories of each season or special day.

Read up on safe toys: buying them, using and maintaining them, and knowing when to discard them. The American Toy Institute offers useful information on the benefits of play and choosing safe, age-appropriate toys for children from birth through age 12. Their colorful pamphlet is on the Federal Citizen Information Center, U. S. General Services Administration Web site: www.pueblo.gsa.gov/cic_text/family/toysplay/fpsp.html.

A text-only site that covers similar information is www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content/toys_ply.html.

A variety of toy safety alerts and publications from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission are online at www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/pubs/toy_sfy.html.

These lengthy web addresses will be listed through December on the Timberland Regional Library Web site at www.trlib.org so people can simply click on them. All Timberland libraries have public-use computers with Internet access.

Timberland Regional Library serves the information, reading and lifelong learning needs of the Grays Harbor, Lewis, Mason, Pacific, and Thurston county public at 27 community libraries and 4 school-based cooperative library centers. The library system is funded by local property taxes. There is no charge for library cards or for attendance at library programs.