A baby's first Christmas has a lot in it, and Tomie dePaola gives every part of it a page. The tree comes in. The ornaments come out of the box. Cookies go on a plate for Santa, stockings go up, and the morning arrives the way it does when you are two years old and cannot possibly wait any longer.

dePaola drew this the way he drew Strega Nona: flat warm color, calm shapes, faces a toddler can read across a room. The text is short enough to finish before a one year old squirms off your lap, and familiar enough by December 20th that they will start saying the last word of every line with you.

Fourteen board pages that survive being chewed, dropped and carried around by one corner. This is the copy that comes back out of the ornament box every year with the date written inside the cover, and that is exactly the point.