Review
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Title: Santa’s First Flight
Author: Sam Beeson
Illustrator: Tom Tolman
Publisher: Covenant Communications
Genre: Children
Year Published: 2007
Number of Pages: 44
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-59811-439-3
Price: $15.95

Reviewed by: Courtney Miller Santo

Many popular movies find comedic gold in the humanization of Santa. In “Santa’s First Flight,” author Sam Beeson and illustrator Tom Tolman take up this theme with a light-hearted (and not at all plausible) approach to the origins of Santa Claus.

It turns out Santa, like the rest of us, used a process of trial and error before coming up with the winning combination of jolly belly, reindeer and a red sleigh. The first year he tried it he used penguins, a snow plow and had the body of a male model. Through a few humorous mishaps and misunderstandings, Santa figures out his mistakes and soon adopts his more familiar trademarks.

Beeson has written this story in a loosely metered AABB rhyming style, which makes it easy to read. I was able to read it (right out of the box) to my two year old and four year old and only stumbled in a few places. The story is illustrated in a sort of hyper-realistic cartoon style with vivid colors and sharp lines with lots of attention to detail.

My four-year old daughter particularly enjoyed the penguins and studied the pictures closely to determine who was who (they all have impossible names like Lolly and Bilbo and Ignatious and they come in all shapes and sizes).

The story is a bit strange in that it is set in modern times, but nobody knows who Santa is and when they hear he is coming, they start putting up wire and guarding their homes. This led to a sort of awkward conversation with my daughter about why people would want to shoot Santa (there is a vivid illustration of guns on page 12). I’m not against guns in children’s books, I just wasn’t expecting them in a book about Santa (and yes I should have read it first and then I could have skipped that page).

There are several nicely illustrated scenes of different cultures (Easter Island and Japan) as Santa progresses through his journey and we all enjoyed looking at those. The book ends on a nice moral note with the idea that, “kindness and giving can mercifully mend the hardest of hearts with a gift from a friend.”

Overall, this is a nicely written and well-illustrated children’s book, which may not become a classic in our home, but will be pulled out for the Christmas season.