December is fraught with stress. Families can reconnect and slow down the season’s mad pacing by sharing holiday stories. Below find recent recommended titles.
Every year writers and illustrators revisit their favorite tales, renewing them with retelling or original illustrations that refresh.
Two Margaret Wise Brown books reappear with new illustrations. Jim LaMarche’s The Little Fir Tree (Harper, ages 4-7) has warm realistic pictures that fit the story of a small fir tree that wants to belong to someone. Anne Mortimer uses vibrant colors to capture a sensory feline view in A Pussycat’s Christmas (Harper, ages 3-6).
Clement Moore’s The Night Before Christmas has two new versions. Rachel Isadora uses an African village as a setting, drawing on pattern traditions for dress, furnishing and even the cheetah-robed, kente-cloth belted Santa (Dial). Tom Browning, meanwhile uses rich oils to accent his old-fashioned country setting (Sterling).
John Cech’s crisp retelling of The Nutcracker (Sterling) features illustrations by Eric Puybaret who distinguishes dreams and the waking world with alternating use of realistic and stylized pictures.
Brett Helquist reillustrates Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol (Harper) with caricatures that carry emotions.
The lesser known Irish holiday tale, The Wee Christmas Cabin is retold by Margaret Hodges (Holiday House, ages 7 and up). Kind and caring Oona, orphaned when young, is not marriage material so she spends her life helping those less fortunate, while hoping for a place in life and a cabin of her own. One Christmas Eve, fairies build her a cabin and every after, it magically appears every Christmas so Oona can shelter the needy.
Gregory Maguire, the author who reinvented The Wizard of Oz with Wicked, does the same for the sad Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Little Match Girl in Matchless: A Christmas Story (Morrow, 2009, ages 7 and up) This story first aired on NPR, but the book version is a small elegant illustrated volume with an ending that is much happier than Andersen’s original.
There’s no better joy that watching young children savor the holiday. These books join in the fun.
The new boardbook “I’m not Santa!” by Jonathan Allen (Hyperion, ages 2-5) provides humor. Little Owl, sporting his Christmas hat, is mistaken for Santa by Baby Hare. No amount of proof can dissuade Hare and the upset of the two young animals mounts until Santa appears to comfort them and set things right.
In The Christmas Magic (Scholastic, ages 4-7), Jon Muth’s soft watercolors combine with Lauren Thompson’s poetic telling that begin by portraying Santa’s North Pole isolation until… “the nights are longest and the stars shine brightest and Santa feels a tingling in his whiskers” and waits for Christmas magic” that comes “as it always has and always will.”
Christmas with Rita and Whatsit by Jean-Philippe Arrou-Vignod (Chronicle, ages 4-7)
Rita and her faithful dog Whatsit happily await Christmas. Whatsit’s exuberance builds as he writes a list for Santa that includes Professor Poodle’s new book How to Train Your Human in 12 Easy Steps and finally stops juggling Christmas ornaments to construct his own tree hung with sausages, salami and bologna. The story captures traditions, warmth and humor of this unique character.
Where Teddy Bears Come From by Mark Burgess, illustrated by Russell Ayta (Peachtree, ages 4-6)
Little Gray Wolf can’t sleep, not even after Mother Wolf’s cuddle and a glass of milk. He has to have a teddy bear so he’s off to a storybook woods to find out where they come from. The Three Little Pigs don’t know, nor does Red Riding Hood. But maybe the old man trying to fix his truck will help. His “Ho, ho, ho’s” are a lot more cheerful than the grumpy pigs. Author and illustrator combine a bedtime story with fairy tale and holiday elements.
Every December brings a surfeit of Christmas books, but it’s wonderful when books show other festivities.
Dimitrea Tukunbo’s The Sound of Kwanzaa (Scholastic, ages 4-7) uses repetition and a sensory details to explain the principals, colors and sounds of each night of Kwanzaa.
My Chanukah Playbook by Salina Yoon (Simon and Schuster, ages 3-6) pairs story, traditions, and interaction. The front of the book sports eight shiny gold circles that can be removed and placed in circles throughout the book, becoming the shields of the Macabees, golden latkes, or gelt.
Pat Mora revisions the classic Christmas song with a Southwestern rendition in A Pinata in a Pine Tree: A Latino Twelve Days of Christmas (Houghton, ages 2-6) Spanish and counting weave together with imagery and lush illustrations by Magala Morales are a perfect complement.
And perhaps the oddest setting switch comes in Esther Heller’s Menorah Under the Sea (Kar-Ben, ages 6 and up). Dan Ginsburg, a marine biologist studying sea urchins in the Antarctic during Hanukkah, longs for the festivities of home. Only when he creates an underwater menorah composed of sea urchins and starfish does he feel the spirit of the season satisfy his soul.