"BLOOMING CHRISTMAS, HERE AGAIN!" Raymond Briggs's hilarious comic strip picture book has amused generations of children, telling the story of grumpy Father Christmas making his rounds on the busiest night of the year. Now reissued in a small gift edition, perfect for slipping into a Christmas stocking . . .

LET THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS BEGIN It isn't always easy, growing up as a human in Elfhelm, even if your adoptive parents are the newly married Father Christmas and Mary Christmas. For one thing, Elf School can be annoying when you have to sing Christmas songs everyday - even in July - and when you fail all your toy-making tests. Also it can get very, very cold. But when the jealous Easter Bunny and his rabbit army launch an attack to stop Christmas, it's up to Amelia, her new family and the elves to keep Christmas alive. Before it's too late . . .

From the series that inspired the hit London Weekend Television sitcom Bless Me, Father: At St. Jude’s, silent nights are rare indeed The holiday season is among the most hectic times at St. Jude’s, and this one is no exception. As always, Father Neil has his hands full with the gleefully domineering, scheming Father Duddleswell, who has devised a fresh plan for this coming Christmas: invite all the other sects of Christianity to celebrate with them. The plan quickly unravels when two religious leaders from another denomination try to convert Father Neil and a clock goes missing from the mantelpiece. When the church collection disappears, it becomes abundantly clear that this will be no ordinary Christmas. Taken from the author’s actual experiences after completing seminary, A Father Before Christmas is a fun and family-friendly romp through a bygone era with a winning cast of characters you will want to visit again and again. Boyd’s well-crafted vignettes of the Christmas season make this a holiday present worth opening early.

Follows the adventure of Babar the elephant as he meets Father Christmas.

Holly carries out a correspondance with Santa Claus in Lapland.

Have you ever wondered where Father Christmas came from? And how he ended up with a factory at the North Pole full of elves to help him make toys? A beautifully illustrated and timeless story about how a toymaker and his wife became Mother and Father Christmas for children all over the world.

Every December an envelope bearing a stamp from the North Pole would arrive for J.R.R. Tolkien’s children. Inside would be a letter in a strange, spidery handwriting and a beautiful colored drawing or painting. The letters were from Father Christmas. They told wonderful tales of life at the North Pole: how the reindeer got loose and scattered presents all over the place; how the accident-prone North Polar Bear climbed the North Pole and fell through the roof of Father Christmas’s house into the dining room; how he broke the Moon into four pieces and made the Man in it fall into the back garden; how there were wars with the troublesome horde of goblins who lived in the caves beneath the house, and many more. No reader, young or old, can fail to be charmed by Tolkien’s inventiveness in this classic holiday treat.

Father Christmas is busy eating and drinking all the treats that have been left for him. But at number ten he realizes he has forgotten to do a very important job ! And he really, really, really needs a wee !

An award-winning poet’s “beautifully written” (The Seattle Times) portrait of an American family and his own coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of his father’s suicide. This memoir “belongs on the special shelves we keep for the books we cannot quite forget” (George Hodgman). The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of secrets. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn’t come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but unspoken. And on a cold night just before Christmas 1973, long after dinner, the rest of the family asleep, Forhan’s father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later, Forhan “excavates both his lost father and a lost era in American history” (Bookpage). At the heart of this “fiercely honest” (Nick Flynn) investigation is Forhan’s father, a man whose crisp suits and gelled hair belied a darkness he could not control, a man whose striking dichotomy embodied the ethos of an era. Weaving together the lives of his ancestors, his parents, and his own coming of age in the 60s and 70s, Forhan paints an “achingly beautiful” (Buffalo News) portrait of a family “in the tradition of Geoffrey Wolff” (Booklist). “Poignant…affecting…Forhan describes his family’s healing and acceptance with warmth, humor, and an admirable lack of bitterness” (Kirkus Reviews). A family history, an investigation into a death, and a stirring portrait of an Irish Catholic childhood, all set against a backdrop of America from the Great Depression to the Ramones, My Father Before Me is “an exquisite example of the power of honesty” (Jeannette Walls), “a wonderfully engrossing book…essential for all parents and children, that is, all people” (Library Journal, starred review).