Posted on by TracyC

The Night Before Christmas

The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore, illustrated by Corinne Malvern, 1949.

This version of The Night Before Christmas is part of the classic Little Golden Books series. The original poem, A Visit From St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore, has been made into picture books for children many times since it was first published in 1823, but this version has some sentimental value to me. I think it was the first version that I ever read as a child. I had forgotten which version it was for years, but when I found this book again recently, I recognized the pictures. (It’s funny, but I remember thinking as a child that the youngest child looks a little too big to be in a cradle, but she is in the picture when the children are being put to bed.) Most people think of the poem as being called The Night Before Christmas instead of its original title, A Visit From St. Nicholas, because the phrase “the night before Christmas” appears in the first line of the poem. Many of the picture book versions that we read as children used The Night Before Christmas or ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas as a title.

This Little Golden Book makes a cozy and pleasant bedtime story for Christmas Eve with its images of a 19th century/Victorian family hanging up their stockings and going to bed on Christmas Eve with the anticipation of the sweets, presents, and fun of the next day. Then, the father of the family is suddenly woken when he hears Santa Claus arriving.

This 19th century poem established and popularized the image of Santa Claus as generations of Americans came to know it. It describes him as a fat and jolly little old man and names all of the reindeer who pull his sleigh. This is probably the first piece of writing that established that Santa has eight reindeer and gave them specific names, which would later be echoed in the storybook and song versions of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

The father of the family in the poem happily watches Santa Claus leaving presents for his children and then leaving by the chimney and riding off in his sleigh with a cheery, “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!”

Various picture book versions of this poem are available online through Internet Archive, including this Little Golden Book version.

Posted on by TracyC

Clifford's Christmas

Clifford

Clifford’s Christmas by Norman Bridwell, 1984.

Christmas is coming, and Emily Elizabeth and Clifford are ready to celebrate! Emily Elizabeth talks about how the Christmas season begins with Thanksgiving. (That’s not how everyone regards it, but it is a common way to mark the season in the United States. The day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, is considered the start of the Christmas shopping season, with people looking for bargains on Christmas presents.)

When it starts to snow, Emily Elizabeth, Clifford, and their friends have fun playing in the snow. They get a Christmas tree, prepare their stockings, and participate in other holiday activities leading up to Christmas. Clifford even gets a kiss under mistletoe!

When Santa comes, he lands on the roof of Clifford’s dog house and accidentally falls into Clifford’s stocking, dropping his sack of toys. Clifford has to rescue him.

The toys fall into Clifford’s water bowl, but Santa fixes them with his magic. No harm done, and it’s a Merry Christmas after all!

This is just a cute Christmas story with a popular children’s books character. I loved the Clifford books when I was a kid, but I have to admit that they don’t look as good to be now as an adult. The entire plot of Clifford books revolves around Clifford’s enormous size, which is the very idea of the series. However, the plot of this is light, the problem is both caused and immediately solved by Clifford’s large size, and I think I’m just not interested in the usual trope of Famous Character Saves Christmas In Some Way anymore. I think that some Christmas stories with popular characters are still good, but for them to work, they usually have to have deeper, more clever, more interesting plots. This book isn’t bad, but I just didn’t think it was particularly great.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Elves Don’t Wear Hard Hats

The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids

#17 Elves Don’t Wear Hard Hats by Debbie Dadey and Marcia Thornton Jones, 1995.

The playground equipment at Bailey School is old and breaking, so the PTA has decided to fund a new playground for the children. The playground is going to be built by the Bell Construction Company, and when the children meet the owner, Hollis Bell, he is an odd little man with curly-toed work boots. In fact, all of his men are unusually short. However, Mr. Bell promises to build the children the best playground they can imagine.

However, the parents at the school are arguing about the playground, how much it’s going to cost, and whether it really needed to be replaced at all. There’s not a lot of Christmas cheer going around, but Mr. Bell puts up Christmas trees and tells the children that they have their own kind of magic that can help fix their parents’ arguing.

One day, Mr. Bell comes to the third grade class to interview them about what they would like to have on their playground. All of the kids have different ideas, and they end up arguing about the things they’ve heard their parents say about what the playground should be like. However, Mr. Bell urges them to calm down and work together. He tells the children that they should make a list of what they all want and “check it twice.” One of the kids in the class says that it’s impossible to give everyone what they want, but Mr. Bell says that he’s in the business of making wishes come true. Liza asks what happens if someone puts down a really bad idea, and Mr. Bell says that he’ll know if an idea is a bad idea. Because Mr. Bell is short, his tools jingle like jingle bells, and he acts like he can grant their Christmas wishes, the kids start thinking that he might be an elf.

The kids are allowed to watch the workmen work, but Mr. Bell makes it clear that they’re not allowed in the trailer that’s attached to his truck. Naturally, the kids get curious about the trailer. They can’t help but sneak a look inside, and when they do, they find out that it’s a workshop full of toys!

As the children try to figure out if the construction crew might really be elves, they decide to ask the department store Santa more about elves. The kids debate about the department store Santa really being Santa, and the Santa makes a comment about how he’s been meaning to pay a visit to their school, seemingly ignoring a previous book in the series, when Santa apparently became their school’s janitor. However, later in the book, Howie refers to the “new janitor who keeps turning down the heat,” referring to what happened in the previous book, which is confusing. The department store Santa explains that his elves like to fix things, and they are particularly concerned with fixing people who can’t get along, hinting that the arguments over the school’s playground are what brought the elves to the school. Santa’s advice is for the children not to worry because the elves will disappear on their own “when the time is right.”

The deadline for submitting the plan for the new playground is approaching, and the kids realize that if the adults can’t agree on something, they might end up with no playground at all! When the “elves” leave to take care of a job “up north,” and the playground issue still isn’t resolved, the kids think that they probably weren’t magical elves and that they didn’t fix anything, but the kids aren’t ready to give up yet.

When Eddie suggests that they all just build their own playground out of wood and begins drawing his vision of it, it attracts the attention of the adults. At first, the kids think that they’ll have to do all the work on their playground themselves, but the more the adults hear them talk and study the picture Eddie drew, the more involved they become. When the adults were in charge, they each wanted to be considered the leader and authority on the project, with their ideas overshadowing everyone else’s, but with Eddie in charge, the project moves forward. Even though Eddie is a child, he’s the one with the vision to carry the project through, and he neutralizes the adults’ competing egos. The project ends up being finished unexpectedly fast, and in the end, no one knows who actually completed it, hinting that the Mr. Bell might really have been an elf and that he and the other elves secretly returned once everyone came to an agreement about what they really wanted. As always with this series of books, readers are left to draw their own conclusions.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Polar Express

PolarExpress

The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg, 1985.

One Christmas Eve, a young boy is lying awake in bed when he hears strange sounds.  When he looks out of his window, he is astonished to see a train outside of his house, where there aren’t any train tracks.  He goes outside to investigate, and the train conductor tells him that the train is heading to the North Pole and asks the boy if he wants to come.

PolarExpressTrainRide

The boy (who is never named) believes in Santa Claus even though some of his friends no longer do, and he gets on board the train.  The train is filled with other children, singing Christmas songs, eating candy, and drinking hot cocoa.

PolarExpressSantasCity

After a long trip over mountains and through forests, they arrive at Santa’s city at the North Pole, where they get to take part in a ceremony to give the first gift of Christmas.  Out of all the children from the train, the boy who narrates the story is chosen to receive the first gift.  He can ask for anything he wants for Christmas, but he asks for a bell from Santa’s sleigh as proof of his adventures and Santa’s existence.

PolarExpressGift

When the children get on the train to go back home, the boy seems to have lost the bell because of a hole in his pocket, and he is sad.  However, the bell reappears on Christmas morning as a mysterious extra present under the tree.  The boy’s parents can’t hear the bell ring, and they think it’s broken, but the boy and his sister, Sarah, can hear it.  The boy says when he and his sister grew up, Sarah eventually reached the point where she could no longer hear the bell, but he still can because only people who believe in Santa can hear the bells on his sleigh.

PolarExpressChristmasMorning

The book is a Caldecott Medal winner, and it has become a Christmas classic!  Some places that have trains hold special Polar Express train rides where they decorate the trains with Christmas decorations and try to re-create the ride from the book.  There is also a movie version of the book, although the story in the movie includes incidents which weren’t in the book to make the movie longer and more dramatic.  The original story was very calm and low-key, although still magical, the kind of thing that you could easily read to a child in bed on Christmas Eve.

Most of what Internet Archive has about The Polar Express is related to the movie, but there is also an audio version of the original book. For the benefit of teachers and homeschooling parents, there is also A Guide for Using The Polar Express in the Classroom on Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Biggest, Most Beautiful Christmas Tree

BiggestChristmasTree

The Biggest, Most Beautiful Christmas Tree by Amye Rosenberg, 1985.

This is a Little Golden Book.

Every year at Christmas, the Chipmunk children, Nina and Nutley, are disappointed because Santa doesn’t visit their home in a large fir tree in the forest.  They always hang up their stockings and put out cookies, but for some reason, Santa never comes.

BiggestChristmasTreeDisappointment

However, this year, their Aunt Mim has figured out the reason why Santa passes them by and what to do about it.  Aunt Mim has realized that Santa can’t find their tree because it looks like every other tree in the forest.  What they have to do is to decorate their tree so that Santa can find it among all the others.

Aunt Mim brings lots of things they can use as decoration, and all of the other animals who live in the tree help with the decorating.  They tie bows on the pine cones, hang strings of berries, and paint balloons to look like large Christmas tree ornaments.

BiggestChristmasTreeDecoration1
BiggestChristmasTreeDecoration2

Sure enough, once Santa knows how to find the Chipmunk children, they get the kind of Christmas they’ve been waiting for!

BiggestChristmasTreePresents

This is just a cute picture book that I liked when I was young.  It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.