Didn’t realize that until adulthood :) bought this book as soon as my daughter was born to read to her each Christmas season.

Her books include the wordless picture book Up and Up , collection of rhymes and poems Out and About , and for the very young The Nursery Collection . We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Hughes is so prolific and I highly recommend seeking out her picture books- not always so easy to find on this side of the ocean. Hughes has a lovely endearing style to her drawing - I will certainly be reading and collecting many other titles from her. Shirley Hughes’s illustrations have the same effect as discovering an old reel of cine film buried in the loft. Her first book - Lucy and Tom's Day - was published in 1960, and she followed it with, among others, Dogger, and the Alfie series. Lovely time for read aloud with what I think are British traditions of Christmas pudding (Lucy and Tom stir), making cards, how they decorate and even what they give as gifts to each family member.

This wonderfully evocative Christmas book reminds me so vividly of my own childhood Christmases, with my mother making mince pies at the big wooden kitchen table and the Salvation Army playing Christmas carols. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. We talk about the differences in the way these children celebrate Christmas in England and they celebrate Christmas in the states. I'm sure I get more pleasure from it every year that passes, enjoying the wonderful illustrations and the simple story of a Christmas with family and friends together.My boys found it inspirational--and pointed out that we did Christmas crackers earlier in the week rather than at Christmas dinner. I grew up with Lucy and Tom in the late Seventies and early Eighties, so revisiting the book now feels rather like looking at my own childhood Christmases, laid out in lovely thick gouache. With each review, I provide a Cleanliness Report, mentioning any objectionable content I come across so that parents and/or conscientious readers (like me) can determine beforehand whether they want to read a book or not. Shirley Hughes is the illustrator of more than two hundred children’s books and has won many prestigious awards, including the Kate Greenaway Medal twice.