If I Could Give You Christmas

A pristine snowy woodland plays backdrop for animal parents introducing favorite holiday sights, sounds, smells, and activities to their furred and feathered children. On each spread, Plourde delivers old-fashioned Christmas imagery via spare, poetic text. A beaver parent, shown in Meyer’s soft art holding up a small evergreen bough tied with a red ribbon, sits alongside the words “if I could give you Christmas,/ it would be the freshest,/ pointiest, piney-est tree.” For two otters, sporting red scarves and whizzing by on a toboggan, Christmas delight is “gliding, snow-white sliding.” And at book’s end, Plourde flips the script—“If YOU could give ME Christmas”—revealing the most important gift of all as a bunny parent and child snuggle in fluffy scarves and mittens. Ages 3–5. [em](Sept.) [/em]