When is a board book not a board book? When it turns into a store! I needed to twist that old joke from Bazooka Joe to illustrate the difference between Christmas Together with Polar Bear and Friends. It’s a picture book from The World of Eric Carle, which brings to mind visions of oversized glossy pages, or possibly thick board book pages of friendly, multi-hued animals asking simple questions or saying simple things. Christmas Together with Polar Bear and Friends can frustratingly be both of those or neither of those. However, if you accept Christmas Together for what it is, it can be a happy, non-secular look at Charistmas via a classic name in children’s literature.
The biggest, or ironically in this case, the smallest difference in what audiences have come to expect from an Eric Carle book, is its size. Odds (more irony to follow regarding that…) are that the Eric Carle books you or your child have seen are board books or oversized picture books. The obligatory Brown Bear Brown Bear, its sibling Polar Bear Polar Bear and any of the other books in that vein have a similar vibe and every family has their own particular favorite. In our house it was the board book version of Polar Bear, with the illustrated book version of Dream Snow.
Christmas Together with Polar Bear and Friends is from Odd Dot, an imprint of Macmillan. Odd Dot publishes the World of Eric Carle books and they’re intentionally small. They fit perfectly in the hands of crawlers to pre-k kids. The books are 5” x 7” and feel more like a book, than a board book. Their pages are on paper that’s just a bit thinner than those that are used for the illustrated book size. The page weight is nowhere near a board book and its size is more portable. If you’re a book preservationist then you’re thinking that this is a recipe for something that last one season in the hands of a three-year old.
That might be true. Christmas Together is in no way trying to trick audiences into thinking that it’s a treasury, collectible edition of Eric Carle. It’s priced the same as the board books, but has a vastly different presentation. However, when you compare any metric of a Carle book against those in this series they feel cheap. They’re impossibly light and small, but adults are not the intended audience.
The joy of looking at Carle’s illustrations is still there, but the pictures are much smaller than I’m used to. If you’re reading the book aloud then the text is still great. However, because it’s so much smaller, the crowd needs to be small due to the fact that they want to see the pictures. Have you ever eaten a great pizza? It’s the kind with feta, capers and spinach. One day you try the individual size when you’re used to the 14’ and that lunch size simply doesn’t hit in the same way? You tell your friends that the big size pizza is worlds better than this, but they’ve moved on to the calzone for the next visit.
Christmas Together with Polar Bear and Friends is like that. If this is your first foray into the World of Eric Carle, c’mon in the water’s fine and the books are wonderful. You’ll experience Christmas Together, have a fabulous time and wonder if they make a book like this any larger or more durable. They do. And if your kids are five or older, or don’t want to carry books around like a pint-sized Alex Keaton then you’ll probably want to stick to the Eric Carle that’s in the board or illustrated book variety.
Christmas Together with Polar Bear and Friends, World of Eric Carle, is by Eric Carle and Odd Dot and illustrated by Eric Carle. It’s available on Odd Dot, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers.
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