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PAPA'S CHRISTMAS GIFT by Cheryl Harness

PAPA'S CHRISTMAS GIFT

by Cheryl Harness & illustrated by Cheryl Harness

Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1995
ISBN: 0-689-80344-3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

In a work subtitled ``Around the World on the Night Before Christmas,'' Harness (The Amazing Impossible Erie Canal, p. 469, etc.) chooses a moment in history from which to launch a provocative journey. It's Christmas Eve, 1822, and Clement C. Moore has just gathered his family to hear his new poem, ``A Visit from Saint Nicholas.'' But what was happening in other parts of the globe that night? Beethoven is out for a ramble, the Grimm brothers regale each other with stories, France's new king sits down for dinner ``with the noble and the knighted. NapolÇon's dead. He's not invited.'' The rhyming text is lively and humorous, but the notion of simultaneity comes to life in pen-and-ink illustrations in which events swarm over pages; each spread of a new location explodes with incidentals that refer back to the main drawing. (Picture book. 5-10)