I recently read my first book by Dahlov Ipkar, The Cat at Night. I enjoyed that book, and found the visual design especially strong, and put Ipkar on my list of picture book writers to read. Hence, My Wonderful Christmas Tree. This was her last book. It came out in 1986, when she was almost 70, but it feels much older. Part of this is the visual style. Part of this is the content.
This is a Christmas picture book about the twelve days of Christmas, but instead of the sometimes confusing sequence of gifts in the well-known song, Ipkar creates a book of celebration. She first celebrates the tree, and then 12 different animals she’d known in her beloved New England to mark the twelve days. So after the tree and a luminous star shining atop it are hailed, Ipkar gives readers two black bears, three bobcats, and so on. The tree and surrounding light fill the right hand page, and so do the bears, and they each get a Christmas animal poem on the accompanying left page. After that, the animals and images are so numerous and large that they fill two-page spreads, and there’s a quatrain of verse on each page. At the end, everyone is brought back on stage, I mean page, for a unifying image that works as a finale.
There’s no story here. There’s just a celebration of Christmas and nature, and implied themes of love, wonder and appreciation.
If you like this, you might visit Ipkar’s website. If you do, you’ll see that Ipkar’s art is lovely, and that it varies quite a bit through her career.
