Blogger: Rachel Kent
My daughter and I are always reading together and this time of year she has two favorite Christmas books. Honestly, both are a little young for her now, but sometimes by the end of a very long day I don’t mind a shorter read before bedtime. 🙂
Her two favorites are Where is Baby’s Christmas Present? by Karen Katz and Christmas Pop-Up Peekaboo by DK Publishing. Both books are lift the flap books. My daughter is really into those right now.
My favorite Christmas book to read to her is Who is Coming to Our House? by Joseph Slate and illustrated by Ashley Wolff. This sweet story about the stable animals preparing to welcome Mary and Joseph can bring tears to my eyes.
I hope you all have time this Christmas season to enjoy a good book!
Do you have a favorite Christmas book to read to your children or grandchildren? Which one?
Please share a favorite Christmas book that you enjoyed as a child.
For me, it wasn’t the what. It was the who. The extended family would gather at Grandma’s house. If I clutched a book to my chest and looked up expectantly, one of my dear aunts would scoop me up and settle into one of Grandma’s many rockers, open the book and devote all her attention to me.
What a wonderful memory! 🙂
I adore Who Is Coming to Our House. Now I want to find the box with my favorite children’s books and dig for this story to share with my granddaughters. Thanks for the reminder.
Merry Christmas!
You’re welcome! Enjoy that precious time with them!!! Merry Christmas.
Hands-down, the ‘Christmas chapters’ from David Donovan’s “Once A Warrior King”, his account of a year spent as an advisor in the Mekong Delta.
* It’s admittedly a stretch for kids, but I’ve found that one of the best gifts one can give a child is to help them with that reach…they WANT to be tall, in every respect, and they’re way smarter than we think they are.
They are so smart! We don’t give them enough credit most of the time. 🙂 Merry Christmas to you!
We have a book called The Sparkle Box by Jill Hardie that I love to read to the my siblings. It is a really simple way to teach kids that the spirit of Christ, and therefore Christmas, is giving.
I’ll have to check this one out!
If I sat one of my kids on my lap, it would hurt.
It blows my mind that when I look at mine, that they used to fit in one arm. One of the “boys” is 6’2. The baby is taller than my husband.
Our daughter was 20 days old on her first Christmas. I may have photos of her under the tree with a ribbon on her head.
Sigh.
Sniff.
Ahem…
I LOVED the Narnia books as a kid. And yes, one pronounces it “Nonn-yah”.
No, it’s NAIR-ny-yay. Ask anyone whose heart is full of Texas.
HAHAHA!! That’s awesome.
AWESOME and TEXAN, dear Jennifer, are synonyms. Ask Shelli.
I love y’all! Got me tickled. And I never pronounce anything the way I think I do … I hear myself one way, and others hear me a totally different way. 😉 But I promise it has way more syllables than two! 🙂
But the British pronunciation shows that it’s a mythical land because it starts with “non.” Lewis probably got the idea from some other mythical books popular at the time he wrote it.
They do grow up fast! I love the Narnia books too. And my Katie still loves the version of The Night Before Christmas that you gave to her, too! Thanks, again. 🙂
The first one that comes to mind is The Littlest Angel by Charles Tazewell. My mother read it to me and my sister when we were children. It’s a sweet story that made a real impression on me as a youngster. I love reading it to my daughter now. I hadn’t thought of it as a tradition, but I guess it is. How lovely.
I actually wrote my one and only Christmas story with the a motivation I tried to avoid looking at – I wanted to read it with a kid. But that won’t happen. I have too much trouble carrying on a conversation, let alone reading. Now I HAD to look at that unrecognized wish, and it’s heavy on the heart.
* I feel kind of stupid saying this, but if anyone would like to read “Angela – A New Mexico Christmas” with kids or grandkids, in my place, I’d be honoured. It garnered some nice feedback, and it even made a Marine fighter pilot cry, so I guess it works. Gladly send a PDF to anyone who might be interested – contact info is on my blog.
Worth the read (says the woman who lives in a barn and collects decorative cows). I’ll try to round up the little cowpokes and give it a go Christmas night.
Dear Shirlee, thank you so much. That means more tome than you may know.
Would love to read it to Katie! I would be honored. rachel @booksandsuch.com.
And you have written another short Christmas story as well. A very clever piece of flash fiction. 🙂
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever! We also love The Nativity Story and The Shepherd The Angel and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog.
Great ones! 🙂
My kids’ favorite Christmas book was “The Story of Christmas Story Book Set & Advent Calendar.” It’s a collection of 24 tiny board books mounted in a larger holder, one for each day of December through Christmas Eve, that told the Christmas story. Each night at dinner, my son and daughter would take turns pulling the next one from its slot. They took over the reading when they could. Then we would hang that night’s book from a branch of the 6-arm chandelier over the dining room table. They loved watching the chandelier fill as we got closer to Christmas. They wanted to keep up that tradition until our son moved out to go to college when our daughter was a junior in high school. I bought a second copy so each of them can have one when they start their own families.
How fun! I’ve never seen anything like that. And what a great idea to grab up extras to give to them when they have families. A lovely tradition.
Angela Hunt’s The Tale of Three Trees
We have a copy of that somewhere, too! I’ll have to find it. I remember loving it.
Any of the Little House books with my kids. Will be reading one of them again together next week!
Yes! I love the one about Ma’s childhood, too. It has a great Christmas scene. Have you read that one?
My favorite Christmas book is Why Christmas Trees Aren’t Perfect by Richard H. Schneider. Love the story and the illustrations by Elizabeth J. Miles are gorgeous.
I will check this one out!
When I was a kid my parents always read us the King James version of the Nativity story from a book called Christmas Carols. There was a different carol for us to sing on every page and just a few lines of text between the songs, so we didn’t get bored hearing the story. The illustrations by Fern Bisel Peat showed us the Christmas story as we sang. I read the same thing to my daughter when she was a kid, too.
Mine is actually a memory made with my children. My first two were born in Lafayette, Louisiana, a place near and dear to this Texan’s heart. Because they were immersed in the Acadian culture from birth, we wanted them to remember that part of their lives when we returned to Texas and then moved to Jakarta, Indonesia. Thus, no Christmas Eve–even now some 30 years later–is complete without the reading of CAJUN NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS by Trosclair.
The story line of this book is fabulous. However, the best part is it is impossible to read it without speaking in the Cajun dialect because the words are written phonetically.
I was able to pass this tradition on to our one-year-old grandson this year am looking forward to this Christmas Eve when he will hear it for the first time.
Every Christmas while my two girls were growing up, I read them Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden. Finally I traded up our yard-sale paperback for the lovely illustrated hardcover. Now my teacher/writer daughter borrows it every year to read to her first graders! We also loved Santa’s Favorite Story, which uses Santa as a frame for the birth of Jesus. Now I’ve bought Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree, but have to wait for my two granddaughters to outgrow their diapers.