Babies know a thing or two about bliss. Gaze at a sleeping baby and amazing things happen: your heart rate slows, your breathing deepens, and brain waves turn from jagged peaks to soothing swells. But rarely is a sleeping baby at hand when you need one. Here is the next-best thing: 100 sleeping babies in a book you can carry wherever you go. Road rage, PMS, and deadline stress melt away to nothing when a sleeping baby is at hand. Just turn to any page and spend 3 seconds transporting yourself back to sleeping babyhood, and you’ll understand why doctors will soon be telling patients, “Look at a few sleeping babies and call me in the morning.”

1. Pick a lovely spot for a cherry tree.
2. Make some compost. In six or eight months, when it is ready, put it in a wheelbarrow.
3. Dig a hole in your spot, and fill it with compost.
4. Plant a cherry tree.

So begin the step-by-step instructions that carry you through the seasons and the years, to that day when you climb a ladder into the branches of your cherry tree, find a comfortable place to dangle your legs, and eat a warm slice of cherry pie. As with any recipe, following the directions is the way to achieve the best results: in this case, an overwhelming sense of satisfaction and some measure of inner peace.

When day turns to night, not all painters pack up their brushes and palettes. Artists through the ages have found inspiration in the night, recognizing in the cover of darkness both poetry and peril. Night Visions presents some 200 paintings of the night by American and Canadian artists of the past two centuries—from the nineteenth-century nocturnes of James Whistler, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Ralph Blakelock to the artificially illuminated visions of many contemporary artists. This arresting collection will turn any reader into a nocturnal creature, free to explore the many enchantments of the night.

Here is the antidote to “snow sickness,” when you’re waiting for the powder to fall—and to cabin fever, when there’s so much snow you can’t get down the driveway. Nearly everything there is to know about snow is presented in a beautiful gift book chock-full of science, lore, and arresting images. The Book of Snow provides: the percentage chance of a white Christmas where you live; the story of Wilson Bentley, a Vermont farmer who photographed some 5,000 snowflakes over many decades; instructions for preserving a snowflake for study in a microscope (it involves hairspray); all the Inuit words for snow; snow-related quotations, poems, stories, recipes, and games; information on snow festivals world-wide; over 100 photographs and illustrations.