Christmas Traditions Around the World

Seventeen countries, seventeen ways to do Christmas. Some cosy, some delicious, and at least one genuinely terrifying.

Christmas does not look the same everywhere. In the Philippines it starts in September and the sky fills with giant lantern stars. In Austria a horned creature called Krampus stalks the streets to deal with badly behaved children. In Japan Christmas Eve is a night for couples, and the traditional festive meal is fried chicken. Christmas Traditions Around the World takes readers aged 8 to 12 country by country to find out how the rest of the planet celebrates.

Where the book travels:

Philippines, Germany, Austria, Spain, France, Italy, Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece, Czech Republic, Ukraine, United States, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Japan and Australia.

What each chapter serves up: the Christmas markets and mulled Gluehwein of Germany, La Befana sweeping down Italian chimneys on Epiphany, the Krampuslauf parades of the Alps, Ukraine's twelve-dish Sviata Vecheria, Mexico's Las Posadas processions, the Greek kallikantzaroi who creep out of the ground for twelve nights, and Brazil and Australia celebrating in the middle of high summer. Food, folklore, music and family custom, one country at a time.

Why children remember it. Every chapter is built around the detail that makes a country's Christmas unmistakably its own: the shoe left out instead of a stocking, the meal eaten at midnight, the creature who turns up when Santa does not. Those are the things readers repeat at the dinner table afterwards, and they are what turn a list of customs into a reason to be curious about somewhere else.

Written to be enjoyed by the grown-up reading it too. The tone is warm and quietly funny rather than encyclopaedic, so it works as a read-aloud, as a December countdown of one country a night, or as a book a curious child will happily disappear into alone. Every country gets full-colour illustrations.

A natural fit for classrooms and libraries building a multicultural holiday collection, for geography and social studies units on customs and celebrations, and for any family that likes the idea of borrowing a tradition or two from somewhere else this year.

90 pages, printed in full colour throughout.