Christmas Parade brings this classic world some seasonal charm

Sandra Boynton is a book treasure. She’s been publishing her distinctive animals with their happy faces, catchy songs, giddy situations and comfort-book food since the early 70’s. Christmas Parade takes her menagerie of critters and puts them center stage in the parade that goes past the pig’s house. They hear the big booms and are initially scared, but then squeal with delight when they realize what’s really happening. If you’ve got a newborn through crawler this is one of the Christmas books that they’ll grow up with and fall asleep to.

One great aspect about Sandra Boynton’s board books is their construction. We have several of them in our forever library. They’ve been through two children from their infant to toddler years, and are still structurally sound enough to make it the next generation. The next generation is relative, if they have kids that’s cool, if now we’ll donate them as vintage children’s books in 25 years.

Christmas Parade will be one of those books for some families. There’s a DNA that every Boynton book shares; some of them have more of it while others have less. In reality, they all probably have a similar amount of cute DNA; it’s just up to what each child has in their interest level as to how attracted they’ll be to each board book. There are the trademark rhyming pages and cute animals. Some of the books have songs and some of them don’t.

There is a chorus on the final two pages of Christmas Parade. This isn’t one of her singing books, those are few and far between, and even those have the ridiculously cute critters in there. Board books are key in getting babies interested in reading and a good board book can set adult readers up for success. They do this by allowing readers to have fun with big, loud voices and movements that compliment the story. Christmas Parade has this in spades with elephants and big bass drums, chickens with bassoons and lots of other that leave you wishing this happy tale would come down your street.

 Christmas Parade is a Boynton Board Book and available on Little Simon from Simon & Schuster,

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