#13- The Night Before The Night Before Chirstmas

The Night Before The Night Before Christmas

Written by: Natasha Wing

Illustrated by: Mike Lester

First Scholastics printing

2007

27 pages

Poetry

I chose this book because of the title. I thought it would be interesting to read a take off of the regular version of The Night Before Christmas. In this book, it seems like everything is going wrong before Christmas. The mom is sick, she burns the cookies, the Christmas tree lost half of its needles, their stockings have holes in them, and terrible last minute shopping. To top it all off, when they get home the cat has destroyed the house. The family ends up having a great Christmas because they have all they need and that is love.

The illustrations in this book look like they are done with color pencil and watercolor. The pictures are cartoon-like and are bright with color. Negative space is used in some of the pictures only showing the important things for that page. The text is informally placed on the page. The line of this book is jagged to illustrate all the commotion at Christmas time. A lot of cool colors are used since the setting is during Christmas.

This book is appropriate for preschool students and up. At the age of 20, I enjoyed this book. I would recommend using this book when reviewing holidays. It would also be a great book to use for character education. Even though the characters have a bad Christmas holiday, they still are happy because they have each other and love. Natasha Wing has not received any awards for this book but has receive awards for some of her other books like the USA Today Best Seller for The Night Before Kindergarten and her book Jalapenos Bagels received the Please Touch Museum (Philadelphia) Book Award. The Night Before the Night Before Christmas is a great book to put a different spin on the story we all know so well.