Gift Guide To Quality Children’s Books From Indie Publishers

Because we strictly limit their screen time, my children are voracious book readers. Reading aloud is also one of the ways to build a family culture around discussion, ideas, shared stories, and connection. This year during Advent and Christmastide, I will be reading my children some of our favorite seasonal picture books while they eat breakfast.

Because I also frequently donate to an upscale private library filled with beautiful classic books where my children can browse freely without encountering moral filth, we patronize small, indie publishers. (A public thanks to Pastor Jamison Hardy for distributing a major grant supporting such libraries in our church body!)

Small publishers are doing a lot of amazing work bringing out new classics and reviving old ones. Here are some of my favorite newer offerings from some of my favorite small publishers. I could probably triple this list but had to end somewhere for now! If you want more ideas, check out a similar list I wrote last Christmas.

Christmas Classics Bundle, Living Book Press

One of my favorite small publishers, Living Book Press, has just put out a beautiful Christmas book bundle with several revived classics you may not have already seen. The bundle includes The Christmas Reindeer, by renowned children’s animal author Thornton Burgess; The Chimes, The Haunted Man, and The Ghost’s Bargain, by Charles Dickens; Old Christmas, by nineteenth-century American author Washington Irving (of “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” fame); and a collection of Christmas short stories from O. Henry, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Gaskell (a marvelously undervalued nineteenth-century English novelist), and more.

Living Book Press is run by a homeschooling family from Australia. I buy as many of their books as my budget allows. They run regular sales if you’re on their email list, but since they already concluded an annual pre-Black Friday sale I’d wait until spring for their next 20 percent off sale to stock up. Check out their entire Christmas category for books you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

Heirloom-Quality Reads for Adults and Children

Last Advent, my personal Christmas purchase was Winter Fire, by G.K. Chesterton, via Theology of Home. It’s a beautifully bound book and provoking reading of some of Chesterton’s lesser-known Christmas essays and excerpts. A great gift for yourself or many people on your list.

One of this year’s new offerings from the Theology of Home ladies is My True Love Gave to Me: A Children’s Catechism for the Twelve Days of Christmas. The book is just out this year from the Roman Catholic publisher TAN Books. It’s a gorgeously illustrated children’s book talking about the theological symbolism embedded in the song.

If you are a Protestant, you may wish to purchase this similar book instead from the excellent publisher Memoria Press. It’s a freshly illustrated version of an older one I pull out for my children every year on Christmas Day:

The Amazon description of the older version of this book is pretty good: “What do eleven lords a-leaping have to do with Jesus’ disciples? In the well-known carol, ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas,’ the lyrics were used to teach children Christian doctrine during a time of persecution in sixteenth-century England. The partridge, turtledoves, French hens, calling birds, and other images all symbolized elements of the Christian faith. In The Real Twelve Days of Christmas, you’ll learn the history of the lyrics and gain a new appreciation for this familiar carol.” I might, however, have to add Theology of Home’s Catholic one to our treasury because its illustrations are so beautiful.

Memoria Press’s Christmas Treasury

To no one’s surprise, the other Christmas books our friends at Memoria offer are superb. The main problem for me was finding them, since their website seems not to include a “Christmas” category. So I have pulled out a full list of my favorites from their website so you don’t have to search for them.

They have a beautifully illustrated version of one of our favorite Christmas tales, Leo Tolstoy’s “Papa Panov.”

If you’re into 12 days of Christmas books (and you should be!), Jan Brett’s version is a must-have family classic.

Two other seasonal books include The Big Snow, by Berta and Elmer Hader (a picture book classic), and I Saw Three Ships, by Elizabeth Goudge. Goudge was a beloved Christian 20th-century British children’s author. Each year I buy a few new Christmas titles for our collection and this year Goudge’s will be one of them.

One last Memoria item I’ll commend to you is the Little House Christmas Treasury, with the classic illustrations by Garth Williams in the most well-known version of the series. It’s a hardback, which I far prefer when buying books because my children throw them all over the house no matter how many times I scold them for doing so. My husband would tell me that I’m not punishing firmly or consistently enough to get a good result, and that’s probably true. Still, even if I were, I’d like to keep these books for the grandkids as well.

From now through Christmas, Memoria is adding a free copy of O Come O Come, a collection of classic Christmas poems, essays, and other selections, to every order.

The Messiah and Other Seasonal Music

There’s a “Messiah” sing-along this year in my town, and I can’t wait to go. Many, many families love to center Advent and Christmas family time around George Friedrich Handel’s masterpiece.

I love Cindy Rollins’ mom-friendly guide to doing so, Hallelujah: Celebrating Advent Traditions with Handel’s Messiah. The second edition is published by the lovely little homeschool publisher Blue Sky Daisies. She offers a listen-along guide to each section as well as numerous traditions, Bible verses, and other scripts she developed while mothering 10 (!) children. This is a very approachable book that just about any family can use.

I picked up this gorgeous guide to “The Messiah” with last year’s selection of Christmas books for our collection. You have to click over to the page at Ad Crucem for Messiah: The Greatest Sermon Ever Sung to see the sample illustrations. This is one of those heirloom Christmas books to put out on the coffee table for children of all ages to absorb. It’s also an excellent visual companion to simply listening to the music.

Those who love symbolism — like we English majors who dabble in painting and such — will find scores of Christmas symbols for seasonal decoration in The Christian Christmas Tree from Ad Crucem. You can also purchase durable Christmons such as those depicted in the book. I have many of them and they are my favorite Christmas decoration (next to the new front-door sleigh bells I just paid too much for at a local pop-up shop!).

Symbols are such a rich way to understand the world, because God himself has woven them into all creation and all creation history. Each one proclaims a special attribute of Truth in its own beautiful way.

That is why I think it’s very important to be literate in symbolism, as it enriches one’s artistic and life experiences, all the way down to movie watching and logo analysis. Symbols are their own language that communicate to people in multisensory ways that reach us beyond words. That is why God uses them, and why symbolic literacy is important for any educated human, but especially for Christians.

My favorite series for children’s hymns are those from Klora Press. I memorize all these great hymns while reading the books to my children. Perhaps their most seasonal new offering is Depart in Peace — the Song of Simeon that liturgical Christians sing every Sunday as we leave the communion altar. It’s also the biblical words this prophet sung when he finally set eyes on baby Jesus.

They also have a beautifully illustrated “O Come, O Come Emanuel” in English and Latin.

You also simply must buy for every child on your list the first book in Katie Schuermann’s new three-part series for children, The Big Father and His Little Boy. It’s a chapter book suitable for about ages eight and above. My kids couldn’t stop talking about it after I dropped it on them. Even my 14-year-old found it absorbing.

It’s about how our earthly fathers sometimes fail us but our Heavenly Father never will — in child-appropriate depictions. Schuermann (a personal friend) is one of the best working fiction writers alive today. Well worth far more than the $15 sticker price.

Christmas Saints and Other Heroes

You don’t have to pray to saints to acknowledge Christian heroes who have died in the faith. It’s just and healthy to honor those who have gone before us and given us good examples to follow. For me and other liturgical Protestants, that’s part of the value we see in observing the traditional church year.

And if you are a traditional Christian of any kind, you should check out Saint Augustine Academy Press. I’m over the moon about their English-translated reprint of a 1928 French children’s book, Saint Nicholas: Patron Saint of Children. I can’t wait to read it to my children on Saint Nicholas day this Advent (Dec. 6).

Warning: Some of these tales are gruesome. The cover depiction, for example, is of little boys butchered and brought back to life by Saint Nicholas. My children have already encountered such things in fairy tales, but YMMV.

In our family, we talk about many of the miraculous tales about saints like Nicholas, the bishop of Smyrna, as legends. It’s not that we don’t believe in miracles, of course, but that we know humans embellish over time and the historical record for most saint miracles is, shall we say, spotty.

My children are very well acquainted with myths and legends, so it is no trouble for them to understand and to practice sorting between tales that are more likely to be true and tales that are less likely to be true. That’s basic historical critical thinking.

We can respect Saint Nicholas for being a father in the faith who loved the truth so much he reportedly punched a heretic in the face (and had to repent of that later). We can admire the Christian virtues attributed to him of charity and self-sacrifice. Respect for our heritage is not the same as idolatry.

I view Saint Nicholas (and Saint Lucy, and Saint Ambrose, etc.) legends as a more interesting and symbolically rich counterpart to the rather weak modern Santa Claus myths and legends. We enjoy learning about the history of beloved Christians all over the world, as it is our own religious heritage.

By the way, I have not been able to find a Saint Lucy picture book I really love. If you know of one, contact me through the Federalist email address below!

Lovely Church Year-Themed Folk Art

I’ll slip in this new picture book I discovered even though Martinmas is past this year and technically not part of the Christmas season. It is thematically fit for Thanksgiving, however, and that has not occurred yet! (A note for other Protestant readers: One line in this book says “Saint Martin, pray for us!”)

Folk artist Heather Sleightholm, the author and illustrator of “Snow on Martinmas,” also has some delectable saint prints in her Etsy shop, including this of Saint Lucy.

Some Lighter Fare

If you are looking for lighter fare to round out your Christmas spirit, go visit Purple House Press’s Christmas selection. One of my deficiencies is an aversion to silliness, but those who don’t have my problem will enjoy their resuscitated picture books. Cranberry Christmas features a grump like me — and it’s a series with several seasonal titles that you may be able to get at your local library if it hasn’t thrown them all out to fill the shelves with pornography.

If you know of a publisher not on this list that should be, please let me know about it via [email protected]! Be forewarned that I boycott publishers who publicly proclaim they select books based on authors’ skin color rather than artistic, historical, and literary merit, and have excluded such from this list to the best of my knowledge. Anti-white bigotry is just as unacceptable as anti-any-other-skin-color bigotry.