(courtesy Scholastic Australia)
SNAPSHOT
When Santa gets stuck delivering Christmas presents, he calls his friend the Easter Bilby to help! Can Bilby deliver all the presents before Christmas morning, or will her wild approach to gift-delivery create all kinds of hilarious Christmas Eve chaos? (courtesy Scholastic Australia)
Poor Santa!
He’s done his back in and on the biggest night of the year! Nothing for it but to call in favours from across the world which includes asking his pal, the Easter Bilby, to play Santa across Australia for the night.
For those not familiar with Australia beyond the fact that it has a distinctive opera house in Sydney and kangaroos & koalas, it’s a BIG place and to get all the gifts to all the kids in one night is a big ask.
So, of course, it’s important that the now-Santa Bilby stick to the plan and deliver the gifts as scheduled, and while the reindeer are aghast that Santa has gone down the marsupial route for his Australian Christmas deliveries, Santa’s new Aussie rep is excitedly confident she can deliver on Santa’s confidence in her.
Until she runs into some issues and has to get really creative to get the toys in kids’ hands, her strategy owing more than a little to what she usually does at Easter!
Santa Bilby by Miranda Birthisel and Cate James is a gorgeous delight, displaying a characteristically Aussie summer Christmas with overhead scenes of Sydney Harbour, Santa Bilby accidentally digging up into the loo (toilet) in her haste to get into a person’s home, and kids on Goanna Parade and Koala Street having fun retrieving their gifts.
The artwork is joyously cute and exuberantly alive, the rhyming couplets sing with festive fun (and more than a little stress) and it feels just like a very unusual Aussie Christmas!
Santa Bilby is available from Scholastic Australia.
