All you should need for Christmas are some charming picture books. These are worth delighting over every year for your family memories, and they're wonderful for sharing. Stick a candy cane in your hot chocolate, grab a cookie and a friend, and cuddle 'round to savor these.

"Fancy Nancy's Splendiferous Christmas" by Jane O'Connor is even fancier than her previous Nancy books, which feature Nancy as the little girl with big words and glittery sprinkles in a plain-vanilla family. She always defines her new vocabulary; in this book, they're shopping for a Christmas tree, and "compromise" means "we end up with the tree my mom wants."

"The Twelve Days of Christmas," lavishly illustrated by Gennady Spirin, is immensely fun to carefully examine. Only the partridge, given on the first day of Christmas, is staid. By the fourth day of Christmas, however, that bird is becoming a bit irritated by the others crowding his pear tree. Fortunately, on the sixth day, the geese show up on the ground. The illustrator must have had some fun with this, but the casual observer turning these pages will see only those eight maids-a-milking rather than the bickering geese.

"The Spirit of Christmas" by Nancy Tillman has a cover sumptuously illustrated with shiny ornaments on a Christmas tree that would make an interesting "I Spy" treat for all the unusual additions. But you may miss the importance of the awestruck child until you've read through to the final pages:

"For as long as the world still spins and still hums,

wherever you are, and no matter what comes,

the best part of Christmas will always be...

you beneath my Christmas tree."

Enjoy a wonderful holiday season and embrace the Spirit of Christmas, no matter your ornamentation.



Mary Burns is the owner of The BookWORKS, located at 1510 Third Street, downtown Marysville, 360.659.4997, or online at www.marysvillebookworks.com. Comments or requests are welcome at [email protected].