Books for the Holidays

It’s Christmas time in Louisiana! This year Elise and her mother are traveling from New Orleans to join her family in Natchitoches to celebrate the season in a very special way.

Along north Louisiana’s Cane River, holiday traditions include parades—even a boat parade!—along the river and a Christmas festival with arts and crafts and carolers singing. The light-bedecked city of Natchitoches enchants Elise. Christmas lights blink from every lamppost and storefront. The twinkling colors are reflected in the river, and fireworks light up the sky. The sugary scent of funnel cakes and cotton candy saturates the evening breeze. But Elise’s favorite holiday treat is the famous Natchitoches meat pie that Maw-Maw sells at her festival booth every year. Can you guess her secret ingredient?

Natchitoches, Louisiana’s oldest city, has celebrated the Christmas season with a festival for a century. Today, the Natchitoches Christmas Festival lasts six weeks long and features hundreds of thousands of lights, days of entertainment for children and adults, and visits from Santa. And everyone’s favorite festival food? The Natchitoches meat pie, of course! The official recipe for this yummy snack concludes the tale of Elise’s family Christmas.

"Yo ho-ho-ho! Michael Lewis's sea-faring Santa tale is surely the best buried treasure you'll ever uncover! The Great Pirate Christmas Battle is so funny you'll shiver your timbers with laughter and clap your hands! Unless you have a hook for a hand. Then you probably shouldn't do that."
—Butch Hartman, voice actor for Family Guy, writer for Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls, and creator of The Fairly OddParents

Take to the high seas with this mordantly witty tale of tinsel and terror. Cap'n McNasty and his rapscallions gleefully plunder children's presents—until Santa Claus and his feisty elves swoop in to put an end to their naughty ways!

Santy's arrival by johnboat is announced by a ruckus between his pet raccoon and Paw's coonhound. After a feast of ham biscuits, Maw and Paw open their musical gifts, and Santy joins in on the frollicatin'.

More Southern Christmas spirit than you can handle!

Cyndi Lou finds herself in a quite a fix when her beau, Billy Ray, tries to secure her affection with an assortment of Christmas gifts. This sounds like a pretty good deal for Cyndi Lou and her Memaw, but when the gifts go on for twelve days straight and include such Christmas "treasures" as razorback hogs, live catfish, and a dozen possums, it's hard for Cyndi Lou to really get into the Christmas spirit. What with all of the armadillos and those Nascar racers taking up residence in the double-wide, is it any wonder the sheriff has to put Memaw in the sanitarium? This enchantingly fractured version of the well-known rhyme for adults will truly "bless your heart!"

A holiday "who done it" for kids. Tallie's Christmas lights were stolen, and she's determined to track down the culprit. Was it the mail man? Her slobbery pup Fuego? To find out, Tallie dons her spy gear, sets a trap, finds the thief, and trades him a more suitable decoration to get her glowing candy canes back.