(via Shutterstock)
I am a big kid at heart.
While I have well and truly grown up and I pay taxes and go the office (thankfully not all the time) and do very adult things, there’s a part of me that loves adventure and fun and busting the day-to-day banality of maturity wide open, something that finds rampant expression at Christmastime.
Many kids books celebrate the season with the whimsy and heart I love about this most wonderful time of the year and these five are no different, offering fun, funny and beautifully drawn diversions into the festive season where Santa is front of centre as is goodness of heart and all kinds of things are magically and wonderfully possible.
They’re a joy to read, whether you have kids to read them to or not – though if you do, how lucky are you to share Christmas with the one age demo that knows exactly how to fully and enthusiastically lean into it – and they will revive a sense of how very special this time of the year is, and maybe even take you back to when you were a kid and life felt brilliantly possible at Christmas in a way it just didn’t the other 11 months of the year.
(courtesy Allen & Unwin Australia)
Christmas is going to be fabulous! It may not be red thanks to a washing mishap – Rudolph may have a super noticeable red nose and he may be great at leasing sleighs BUT do not trust him with your bright colours! – but it will be pink, and it will be wonderfully different to any other Christmas that’s gone before! Pink Santa is a fresh, fun twist on the usual night before Christmas tale not only because it dares to playfully broach the idea of a nude Christmas for the jolly man in, well NOT red, but because it encourages everyone who reads it to defy convention and go with the flow. Tradition is lovely and warm and wonderful and there’s a reason we love festive ones so much. But as Santa, who takes all the non-red outfit shenanigans in stride and with impressive food humour, observes “The lesson I learnt … is the best things in life sometimes from mistakes.” Written by inventive Aussie writer and comedian Tanya Hennessy, and illustrated with wit, colour and verve by Ben Whitehouse, Pink Santa is brilliantly irreverent Aussie fun that manages to turn the usual festive tales on its head while evoking all the warm spirit and sense of belonging of the season with rhymes that will make your heart sing and your world feel a lot brighter and pink … or maybe even yellow.
Pink Santa is published by Allen & Unwin Book Publishers.
(courtesy official author Facebook page)
Dharma the Christmas Llama by Matt Cosgrove
(courtesy official Matt Cosgrove site)
There are two types of people in this world – those who LOVE Christmas with all caps, all red and a buoyant endless sense of out-there festive bonhomie and those who, well, find it all a bit too much. Like Dharma the Llama who’s happiest and alone reading her way through her TBR pile which includes, rather wonderfully, titles like Gullama’s Travels, The Very Hungry Llama and, fittingly for this time of year, A Christmas Carol-lama. In a season where there’s poetically rhyming ring-ding-ting-a-ling and clatter-chatter-natter mingling, Dharma prefers to be in her tub “avoiding all that Yuke hubbub” (she’s not a grinch; “she just finds Christmas much TOO much”). In Dharma the Christmas Llama by Matt Cosgrove – it’s the latest in a series that features Dharma and Macca the Alpaca – Dharma is forced to step out of her comfort zone when Macca who LOVES Christmas has a mishap and save Christmas which she does in a way that uniquely and fittingly her. It’s a delight to read that wishes us the very best of the season in a way that encompasses the universality of the season in the best way – “Loud or quiet, whichever way, have a Merry Christmas day!” and honestly you can’t help but feel festive when you’ve finished.
(courtesy official Matt Cosgrove Twitter account)
Dear Santa, I Don’t Need Socks by Consuelo F Ortiz
(courtesy official Five Mile Facebook page)
Leaving aside the fact that socks are right down there on the fun scale when it comes to Christmas gifts, there’s one very good reason why you don’t want the woollen footwear as a gift in Australia – it’s just too hot! That point is made with great fun in Dear Santa, I Don’t Need Socks by Consuelo F. Ortiz which celebrates the fact that Aussie Christmases are hot, sticky, sweaty affairs and that the one thing you need to be comfy are not socks but thongs (flip-flops) and great beachwear. Christmases down under are spent trying to stay cool which socks, to be fair, are not that good at doing. In this absolutely delightful book, Aussie the koala writes to his cousin Olvai, who lives in Lapland, in the northernmost part of Finland with his reindeer friendLumi and explains why socks are necessary in a place that’s “colder than inside a freezer” but not in Oz, and specifically the “quiet little town” of Mallacoota down on Australia’s southeastern coast. Filled with playfully cute and vibrantly colourful art that is worth the price of the book alone, Dear Santa, I Don’t Need Socks does a beautiful job of explaining how Christmas is different in the southern hemisphere and how maybe this year it might be a good idea if Olavi comes down to experience it.
(courtesy official Five Mile Facebook page)
Christmas at the North Pole (Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom)
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
I discovered Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom one day on the TV when I was minding the then-very young nieces and nephews and what struck, and massively amused me the most about this entertainingly clever and hilariously sweet series, was how brilliantly it wrote for the adults as much as the kids. It’s full of all kinds of seditious humour, and so, while the kids are learning all kinds of lovely lessons, the grown-ups are having a ball chortling at a slew of witty asides. This approach is, not surprisingly, reflected in the Christmas at the North Pole, not so much in the story which is all about a routine dropoff to the trip to the titular location not going according to plan which necessitates a lift home from Santa, but from the playful dialogue and the artwork which makes Santa and his elvin neighbours come alive in some delightfully cute ways. If Christmas is about escaping the same-old, same-old dregs of the everyday, then Christmas at the North Pole gives it a visual sense of fun, a lovely evocation the importance of family and belonging and a really mischievously offbeat look at how magical this time of year can be.
Little Unicorn’s Christmas (Ten Minutes to Bed) by Rhiannon Fielding and Chris Chatterton
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Unicorns are the new zombies in that they’re everywhere and Ten Minutes to Bed: Little Unicorn’s Christmas by Rhiannon Fielding and Chris Chatterton gives them a little more time in the glittery, sparkly sun as Twinkle the unicorn prances through the trees, which are suitably sparkling “with magical light”, as day turns to night on Christmas Eve. While Twinkle is reminded by her father that she has just ten minutes until bedtime, she notices a sleigh and some reindeer in the sky just before she meets the big man in red himself! He’s in a pickle – one of his reindeer is sick, he still has 22 countries to deliver to and his delivery vehicle needs a little bit of extra pulling heft. In comes Twinkle with just five minutes to go until beddy-byes and, well, as you might expect, the day is saved. Quite how is best left to the reading, and yes, your child will adore the sweetness of Twinkle’s generously giving heart but also the vibrantly cute artwork full of adorable forest animals and elves and the perfect Christmas setting. The book is very much in the selflessness at Christmas vein and that alone is a lesson worth heeding but it also makes it clear that even at the most wonderful time of the year, you need some rules and some rest which Twinkle gets right on time after what’s likely the most amazing night of her young pink and glittery life.
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)