Christmas Kids

If your family is at all like mine, you have about a trillion kids to buy presents for this Christmas.  Kids are hard to shop for; toy stores are overwhelming and generic, they hate clothes, and what else are you supposed to get them?  I'm a big fan of buying kids books, but it's hard to buy books sometimes.  Most kids have Goodnight, Moon or Where the Wild Things Are (and if they don't you should buy those for them immediately), but there are some lesser known classics they should own as well.  

In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak,  author of Where the Wild Things Are, was my favorite book growing up.  About a kid who ends up in a pastry airplane and takes a ride through the kitchen.  He ends up in a glass of milk that breaks up the pastry and brings him back to his warm cozy bed.  

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss is a great treatise on deforestation and our climate crisis that's written in such a way it is easily accessible and not to freaky for kids.  If you want to teach kids to be respectful of the Earth, this is the book for you.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst follows Alexander through is bad day that just keeps getting worse.  In the end, it teaches a valuable lesson about picking yourself up off the ground after a bad day and looking forward to the next good one.  

Finally, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett ends up in the vein of The Lorax when you read closely.  It is about a town where meals rain from the sky.  One day, the pancakes get so big they cover houses and knock down trees, meatballs fall through roofs, soup floods the town of Chewandswallow and all the townspeople are forced to leave.  One of my favorites from childhood.  

Happy Holidays (and Reading),

Julia