Welcome back to our series, 20 QUESTIONS!,

where we answer questions about writing, reading, and author life.

This month’s question:

What’s a favorite family holiday tradition?

Ever since my girls were little, I’ve given them a wrapped book under each of their pillows for Christmas morning. This way their first present was always a book. They are now in highschool and they still look forward to their surprise book.

– Darshana Khiani, author of HOW TO WEAR A SARI, illus. Joanne Lew-Vriethoff (Versify, 2021)

Throughout the year, my family writes down on scraps of paper happy moments we’ve experienced (and the date) and adds them to our “happy jar” – a covered basket I got in Uganda years ago. Then on New Year’s Eve, we pass the basket around between family and friends and take turns pulling out slips of paper and reading the memories aloud. I type up the memories, so now we have a family journal of sorts that goes back eight years!

- Melanie Ellsworth, author of BATTLE OF THE BOOKS, illus. James Rey Sanchez (Little Bee Books, 2022)

The shopping day many know as Black Friday is instead Craft Friday in my family. From the moment we wake we spend the entire day craft, craft, crafting together. We make all sorts of crafty things, ornaments, collages, lots and lots of handmade books (often photo albums from the year before), but anything really—as long as it’s handmade or altered in some way. My husband cooks a giant turkey pot pie (leftovers), and we feast and laugh and share joy amid the crafts and creativity. It’s a blast!

—Kjersten Hayes, author of THE ELEPHANTS’ GUIDE TO HIDE-AND-SEEK, illus. Gladys Jose (Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, 2020)

Our tradition is attending Christmas Eve service in a one-room prairie church that remains unchanged from when my Danish ancestors built it in the late 1800s. There is always a huge tree cut from a pasture, bulb lights powered by a generator, a roaring fire in the stove, and peanuts whose shells we crush on the floor to oil the wood.

— Lindsay H. Metcalf, co-editor of NO WORLD TOO BIG: YOUNG PEOPLE FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE (Charlesbridge, March 2023) and NO VOICE TOO SMALL (Charlesbridge, 2020), and author of FARMERS UNITE! (Calkins Creek, 2020, and BEATRIX POTTER, SCIENTIST (Albert Whitman, 2020)

When my kids were little, I would buy one (ok, maybe two or three) holiday picture books each year. Then, after Thanksgiving, I would wrap up our collection of holiday picture books and put them in a basket. Each day, a child would pick a book and unwrap it, and we’d read the book together before bed under the Christmas tree. It was like a book-a-day advent calendar. Nowadays, I don’t wrap up the books, but we still enjoy reading them together, even though my kids are now teens.

–Kirsten W. Larson, author of THE FIRE OF STARS: The Life and Brilliance of the Woman Who Discovered What Stars Are Made Of, illus. Katherine Roy (Chronicle, 2023)