St. Nick's Is for Books
A children's book gift guide
Hi everyone,
(Good news! I turned in my book manuscript. Hurray! So — now to get back to our regularly scheduled programming. In this case, the festive kind.)
When I was a child, I used to read a complete chapter book almost every night. The books I read were a major moral force in my life, giving me some of my first ideas about virtues like honor, fidelity, perseverance, and prudence. I still treasure these stories and remember many of them quite clearly. Plus, I still find children’s books just massively fun. Some of the best fiction out there is written for children!
So this year, instead of doing a guide to children’s gifts for the Christmas season, I thought I’d do a children’s books gift guide. We’re posting it just a little early this year so that you have time to shop before St. Nick’s Day on December 6 (read more about that tradition in the article!).
Read the gift guide here:
“Book gifts for kids for this Christmas season”
Your turn:
Have you read any of these books?
Do you like to give children books as gifts?
Are books Christmas gift staples for you?
Yours,
I love this tradition! I might see if my family can squeeze this in. My girls are 16, 14, 12, and 2, and we always give them a book among their Christmas presents. Easter is another book-giving holiday for us as well.
For my teens, we've been really into books published by Enclave Publishing. They specialize in speculative fiction by Christian authors; my girls have loved all of the series that I've given them.
During the Advent season, we always do a read-aloud of the Jotham's Journey series, by Arnold Ytreeide. Each book is about a child(for instance, a lost shepherd boy) making his way to Bethlehem just in time for Jesus' birth, encountering adventures along the way. It's designed to be read one short chapter per day, along with a short devotional/discussion question, culminating in the discovery of baby Jesus on Christmas Day. The main character gets chased all around by bad guys, so it may be a little scary/intense for very small children. There are four books in the series, each of which follows a different child and their story, so you can read a new one each year.
Dixie, reading through your book list gave me a little thrill of memories...All our kids are grown out of those books now, and I find myself missing that phase of childhood (mind you, my 16-year old just reread Paddington out of pure fun early yesterday morning and proclaimed what a superb book it was!). My daughter also greatly enjoyed The Saturdays, and The Light Princess was a her favorite book in Tessa Carman's Intro to English Literature class. My kids were also great Magic Treehouse fans and for one Christmas I actually created a boardgame filled with Trivia questions about all the books. I am sure your son will be delighted to receive the Redwall Cookbook! Thanks for sharing such festive book fun:)