THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

The classic Christmas poem gets citified.

Everyone knows Moore’s yuletide mainstay: “ʼTwas the night before Christmas, / when all through the house,” and so on. In the typical picture-book treatment, the home at the poem’s center is a single-family dwelling, its closest neighbor too far away to hit with a snowball. In Semmer’s rendering, the words “So up to the housetop the coursers they flew” are accompanied by an image of Santa’s reindeer on the roof of an apartment building that’s part of a city block. This time around, “the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow” is paired with an illustration of, not a pristine lawn, but a snow-dusted cityscape, and the spread announcing “I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick” finds a brown-skinned guy, not a white dude, wearing the red suit. The book’s narrator is a Black child who lives in a beautifully appointed apartment with a cat and two siblings, two parents, and a grandparent. Semmer’s blocky, digitally tweaked pencil art, which suggests cut-paper tableaux, is micro-detailed and thoroughgoing—there is no unused space—and the traditional Christmas colors are represented by variants like tomato red, mint green, and mustard gold. Absolutely everything is alluring, especially the Christmas cookies, which sit on a dining table that faces not a Currier and Ives print, but a picture window overlooking a suspension bridge.

Good tidings indeed.