A federal judge ruled on Monday that sections of an Arkansas law, which sought to impose criminal penalties on librarians and booksellers for distributing “harmful” material to children, were unconstitutional.

The law, known as the Arkansas Act 372, was signed into law last year by Republican governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. It was challenged by a coalition of organizations in the state, leading to a lengthy legal battle that concluded this week.

Two sections of Act 372 subjected librarians and booksellers to jail time for distributing material that is deemed “harmful to children”. Proponents of the law, including Sanders, said the law was put in place to “protect children” from “obscene” material.

“Act 372 is just common sense: schools and libraries shouldn’t put obscene material in front of our kids,” Sanders said in a statement to KATV-TV. “I will work with Attorney General Griffin to appeal this ruling and uphold Arkansas law.”

The governor signed the bill into law in March 2023, and a coalition of organizations in the state, including the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock and the ACLU of Arkansas, challenged it last year, saying the law was vague, overly broad and that the fear of criminal penalties would have a chilling effect on librarians across the state. A federal court temporarily blocked the enforcement of the two sections in question, while the law was being challenged in court.

The two sections that were struck down on Monday had established a criminal misdemeanor for “furnishing a harmful item to a minor”, and would have required local governments to create oversight boards to review challenged material. The organizations opposing the law argued that local officials, at their own discretion, could censor whichever books and material they pleased.

“This is a significant milestone on a long, sometimes rocky road we were obligated to travel after the passage of Act 372,” said Nate Coulter, executive director of the Central Arkansas Library System, in response to Monday’s ruling.

“We took that path to protect our librarians from prosecution for doing their jobs and to prevent some local elected officials from censoring library books they did not feel were ‘appropriate’ for our patrons to read.”

In 2004, a federal judge struck down a similar law. The year prior, the state passed a law that required booksellers and librarians to hide materials deemed “harmful to minors”. It was deemed unconstitutional after legal challenges.

Editor’s note: This is a revised and updated version of a column first appearing Christmas Eve 2015.

On a Saturday morning that spring, I sat alone, having breakfast at Leo’s in Hillcrest. A text came in from Gwen Moritz, then editor of Arkansas Business and regular estate-scale scavenger.

She said she was at that moment looking quite possibly at the very item I’d written longingly about in a Christmas column.

She was at an estate sale at a house maybe five blocks away. I hurried over and went upstairs.

Indeed, she’d found it, or, more precisely, one very much like it.

There was a brief discussion of estate-sale strategy. You could take a chance that the item wouldn’t sell, in which case you could get it for less on Sunday afternoon.

I took no chance. Full price. Right now. Into my Jeep. Then into the attic, until it was time.

And now it is time.

If all goes according to recent tradition this evening, at or about midnight, I will sit in a comfortable chair next to a deeply warming splash of Jameson whiskey.

I will turn off all lamps, overhead lights, smartphones, laptops and television sets. I will gather the beagles Roscoe and Sophie at my feet. Shalah will be nearby, pleased to behold my rare serenity.

In the darkness, I will gaze upon, and lose myself in, the vintage 6-foot aluminum Christmas tree, circa ’65, in the corner, a wonder of glorious nostalgia and tackiness.

I will watch the slow-circling color wheel transform the shiny tinfoil of the tree to a calm deep blue and then a peaceful yellow and then a shining green and then an understated red, and back around.

I will listen for the brief grinding sound each time the wheel reintroduces blue.

I will escape to childhood, to life at 10 to 12 in that flat-topped, four-room house at the end of a graveled lane in southwest Little Rock. I will recall a tree like this one, and a permanently creaking color wheel a little bigger and better than this modern online discovery.

I will be returned to that hardwood floor of the mid-1960s, flat on my stomach, eyes fixed, deep in my happy certainly that this exotic aluminum tree–framed by a picture window outlined in blinking lights–was surely the most magnificent among all monuments of the season.

I will remember the happiness and safety of those 1960s Christmases–of, in fact, an entire childhood.

I will be thankful for the hardworking low-income parents who provided that happy and safe childhood, and the little fundamentalist church that nurtured it, and the public school that educated it, and the community that encouraged it, and the backyard that was a field of dreams–a baseball park, a football stadium, a basketball arena, a golf course.

It was there I threw and caught the passes, even punted high and ran to make the fair catch.

It was there I provided the roar of the crowd and the play-by-play announcing and color commentary.

I concocted a baseball card for myself, one with impressive statistics and a brief biography that included the nickname: “Fly Ball Brummett.”

My dad told me that you don’t want to hit fly balls, boy, because they get caught for outs. And I explained that fly balls sent airborne by “Fly Ball Brummett” arced like gentle bombs to distant places no outfielder could reach.

He said I was talking about line drives. I said these soar higher than that.

We’d argue that way, and more seriously, for a few more years, and then each of us would realize that the other was smarter than we had thought. Then we got along fairly well.

Cigarettes took him much too young, younger by seven years than I am now. My mom gave me his cufflinks and tie clasp that first Christmas without him. I fled the room teary, much as he’d fled the room that Sunday afternoon years before when I coaxed enough Okinawa memories out of him that he mentioned “Sarge.”

After a half-hour of Jameson sips and color-wheel hypnosis, I will head to bed. And I will think about Mom, gone now three years, after four years in a nursing home for what they call “cognitive decline.” I will wonder if she remembered at the end, if but for a fleeting moment, that aluminum tree and color wheel of our cozy, happy little home.

It’s more likely that she remembered instead in those last years the very thing I’d spent those moments remembering–the safety and happiness of childhood, her own, which is where she spent her final days.

There are far worse places to be.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.