Lucy & Tom's Christmas (Picture Puffin S.)

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The page where we see the presents that Lucy and Tom have both bought for their families raised a particular chuckle of recognition.

She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was the first recipient of BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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 . 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.

Her first book - Lucy and Tom's Day - was published in 1960, and she followed it with, among others, Dogger, and the Alfie series. It's the first Christmas book I've ever read that showed the children "posting" their letters to Santa by burning them in the fireplace. She wrote two novels for older children, Hero on a Bicycle , about a 13-year-old Italian boy during the occupation of Florence, and Whistling in the Dark , set during the Liverpool Blitz.

Shirley Hughes has won the Other Award, the Eleanor Farjeon Award, and the Kate Greenaway Medal for Illustration twice, for Dogger in 1977 and for Ella's Big Chance in 2003. 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.

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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. One of the loveliest things to do at Christmas is cuddle up and enjoy a good picture book together – and these classic stories have really stood the test of time. I also love the English flavor of these books, fun to point out expressions like "cross" that may not be so familiar to American children. She also collaborated with her daughter, Clara Vulliamy, on the Dixie O'Day series; which saw Shirley with an illustrator for the first time with Shirley writing the text and Clara creating the illustrations.Perhaps it's the spirit of the season that permeates this book, even for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere. 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. The quiet joys of Christmas preparations and the day itself, with great sympathy for a child's perspective.

I used to read it every Christmas to my children when they were young and now I'm reading it again to my grandchildren.

We talk about the differences in the way these children celebrate Christmas in England and they celebrate Christmas in the states. 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. Content surprises are super annoying, especially when you’re 100+ pages in, so here’s my attempt to help you avoid that! 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.