Enjoying the magic of the seasons throughout the year: the exhibition, "Spirit of the Holidays, " illuminates the season with charming, rarely seen examples of Tasha Tudor's original art for greeting cards and children's books created for those special celebrations--from Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's to Valentine's Day, Easter, and Halloween.

• Position: Museums Today

FAMILY, ART, AND NATURE have been at the center of Tasha Tudor's life for years. Her hard-won success--as an author, artist, illustrator, and parent--is a constant source of pride for the still-working 90-year-old. Rejecting commercial fads and popular opinion, she cultivates the virtues of a simpler existence and exemplifies without pretension a life that many dream of but few understand how to realize.

Tudor continues to produce her signature watercolors at her idyllic, rural Vermont farm, where she has fashioned an intimate world of her own making. The artist's studio is her kitchen, where she sits balancing her work on her lap. Her appreciation for simpler times is reflected in both her style of life and illustration. Tudor long has devoted significant time to the enjoyment of holiday traditions she shares with family and friends. From the illustrations in her first published children's book, Pumpkin Moonshine (1938), Tudor has pursued her interest in depicting holiday stories and scenes.

The exhibition, "Tasha Tudor's Spirit of the Holidays"--on view through Feb. 5 at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Mass.--illuminates the season with charming, rarely seen examples of the illustrator's original art for greeting cards and children's books created for holiday celebrations, from Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's to Valentine's Day, Easter, and Halloween. Original portraits of Tudor as a girl by her mother, artist Rosamond Tudor, delicate childhood drawings, original handwritten manuscripts, miniature doll cards, hand-decorated boxes and Easter eggs, photographs, and almost 100 first-issue holiday cards dating from the early 1940s onward are among the heartwarming treasures to be enjoyed. Tudor's art reflects the simple pleasures that can be had in life by savoring each passing season, celebrating special days, and cherishing the most fleeting moments.

A companion exhibition, "Tasha Tudor's Spirit of the Holidays at Orchard House"--on view through Feb. 28 at Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House, Concord, Mass.--features Tudor illustrations that graced the pages of the Alcott classic, Little Women. Besides these original watercolors, Orchard House's display includes preliminary pencil drawings from A Round Dozen (an Alcott anthology published posthumously in 1963) and a wide variety of Tudor sketches, prints, notecards, and related items based on her designs.

As an illustrator, Tudor utilized her talents by decorating works of...