Santa's Busy Christmas
Santa’s Busy Christmas is indeed a busy picture book—filled with multicolor explosions, zany situations, and holiday delights.
Evi Triantafyllides’s jovial picture book Santa’s Busy Christmas follows a wild and crazy Santa across continents as he hands out gifts to turtles, penguins, and children alike.
Loaded up on Christmas Eve, Santa’s mission to hand out gifts around the globe takes a wacky turn as he delivers stranger and stranger presents to creatures of all shapes and sizes. There are also costume changes as he crosses into the Southern hemisphere and dons a bathing suit to deliver singing surfboards to Australian children; he has meetings with giraffes who are gifted tape measures that stretch to the sky and back.
The illustrations take each zany idea and run with it. They have a gorgeous pastiche quality, overlaying images on top of one another in a style reminiscent of paper cutouts. This allows for funky combinations and contrasts: An orange-and-purple polka-dotted giraffe stands beside a measuring tape draped over a cloud; a child in a beret slides down a hunk of holey cheese out of which other hunks of cheese pour; green origami boats and birds fly against a lavender background propelled by the power of their magical flatulence. As the text throws reason to the wind, so too do these whimsical drawings. Even the lettering of words becomes a multicolor explosion.
With so much to look at on the page, the adept mirroring of text and illustration allows for the story to continue shining through the off-the-wall illustrations. The prose is limited to a few evocative lines—often fewer than fifteen words on a page—that summon fun, playful ideas. There are clapping chopsticks, Frisbee waffles, and sneezing scarves. The short lines are arranged in theatrical ways within the illustrations so that they become a part of the drawings themselves. Despite their concision, they home in on wacky imagery well, and their directness allows the accomplished illustrations to fill in the rest.
A joyous reimagining of the Santa story, the picture book Santa’s Busy Christmas includes out-of-this-world presents highlighted in imaginative illustrations.
Reviewed by
Willem Marx
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
