The Wild Christmas Reindeer - Jan Brett

When you type in the search "Children's Christmas Books" on Amazon.com, more than 31,000 results come up, ranging from books about Santa Claus to traditional religious stories about Baby Jesus. My favorite Christmas book was easily The Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett. The beautiful illustrations and intricacies of each and every page drew me in every Christmas and even during the year as well.

Jan Brett (well-known author and illustrator of books like The Mitten) takes us through a beautiful story of a girl named Teeka, who is one of Santa's elves. She is put in charge of getting all of the reindeer ready to fly on Christmas Eve, despite the fact that she's never worked with reindeer before. She ventures out into the tundra to go find them, and herds them together (not without making her work for it), and takes Bramble, Heather, Windswept, Lichen, Snowball, Crag, Twilight, and Tundra back to the barn, which she refers to as Winterfarm. The book chronicles her journey with the reindeer and the struggles that she goes through in trying to get them ready for Christmas Eve with Santa. She learns that she cannot yell at them and demand them, but rather, has to be calm and patient with them, which works much more effectively. In the end, Teeka watches the reindeer fly away with Santa and carry the sleigh into the dark night.

My favorite part of this entire book is the side illustrations. If you notice, each page counts from December 1st all the way until December 24th. The illustration for December 24th is pictured to the right. Jan Brett really shows her strengths here as an illustrator, which I definitely think is her ability to pay attention to minute details. In each picture to the side of a page (and in the frames of the pages themselves), there are extremely detailed and ornate dolls, stained glass, toys, elves, blocks, and so much more. We get to feel like we're peering in Santa's workshop and are seeing how work is progressing day by day. Certain Christmases I remember my parents only allowing us to read a page of this story a day, the page that correlated with the day that it currently was. That made us incredibly excited and nervous about the plot of the book.
Even though the illustrations are beautiful, I've always thought it interesting that Jan Brett didn't choose to use stereotypical Santa Christmas things, and seemed to be a little more inspired by Scandinavian sorts of traditions than the specific names of reindeer that we have popularized in America. The reindeer aren't named Dancer and Prancer and Vixen. They're named more earthy names, like Lichen and Twilight and Bramble. She is known in her work to have different cultures represented, ranging from Africa to Scandinavia. I loved that she was able to integrate this culture into a well-known tradition of Christmas that tends to be extremely "Americanized" in its exposure in the world.
I thought about ways to integrate this into a classroom and found this extremely interesting variety of lesson plans on how to integrate The Wild Christmas Reindeer in the classroom and to almost turn it into an entire unit for first and/or second graders. There are tons of great ideas in here that range from math to reading units, which is awesome! I will definitely consider adding this to my classroom in Holiday time, but also making sure I include various holiday traditions and not simply Christmas to expose students to a variety of cultural knowledge.