A Sleigh Bell (And A Story) You Won't Forget

"The Polar Express" is the Christmas book to end all Christmas books. I am just about 20 years old (still young to many of you, I know!), and I am still enamored with this book, which might be evident giving that I am writing about it at the end of April. It is the perfect embodiment of "The Christmas Spirit" that's so easy to lose track of around the holidays.

Since it is a children's book, it is a simple story/picture book about one boy's magical journey to the North Pole one Christmas Eve. I won't give away more than that (half the magic of the book is watching the story unfold in front of you on the pages, whether it's the first or hundreth time you've read it), only that you won't ever think about the sound of sleigh bells in the same way once you close the back cover. For such a simple book, it packs a perfect amount of emotion and hope into the story for it to be uplifting to children and adults (and the in-betweens, like myself!) the same. The illustrations are lovely, they have a muted, elegant touch, nothing cartoonish about them. The book is a Caldecott Medal winner, and it is well deserving of that recognition.

This past December, when I came home from college a few days before Christmas and found my house all nicely decorated, one of the first things that I did was to look through the stack of Christmas books on the coffee table, looking for "The Polar Express." My mother had always read it aloud to my sister and I when we were young, and I still loved leafing through it. I couldn't find it anywhere, and I was distraught when my family came to the conclusion that it had been misplaced, who knows when to be found again. Christmas morning, to my delight, I opened my sister's present to me--my own new copy of "The Polar Express". Believe me, it will be read with continual happiness each Christmas, and read to my children down the road, keeping "The Christmas Spirit" alive.