We're always on the lookout for great books to help our family celebrate holidays in a non-religious context. Here are some of the best books we've found for kids' ages 4-8 for the Spring Equinox / Easter holiday.

The Country Bunny and the Little Golden Shoes by Du Bose Hayward, illustrated by Marjorie Flack. First published in 1939, The Country Bunny is a fascinatingly feminist take on motherhood for its era. Author Hayward (the man who also wrote Porgy, which would be adapted into George Gershwin's musical Porgy and Bess) tells the story of a happy mother of many children who gives up her dreams of becoming one of the five appointed Easter Bunnies (yes, there are five, not one, didn't you know?) who are the swiftest, wisest, and bravest bunnies in the land - but then seizes the opportunity to show her stuff when selection time comes, and proves that her childrearing skills actually demonstrate her worth. She then takes on the challenges of helping the other four Easter Bunnies deliver eggs to all the children of the world. | Buy on Amazon

The Bunny Who Found Easter by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by Helen Craig. A little bunny hops through the seasons of the year in search of a place called Easter, because that's where a wise old owl told him he'd find other rabbits. In the end, the bunny learns that "Easter was not a place after all, but a time when everything lovely begins once again." Through the rabbit's journey, which spans the summer, winter, and spring, The Bunny Who Found Easter emphasizes the Easter holiday's position as a time to celebrate and a time of renewal of the earth and the seasons. | Buy on Amazon


The Spring Equinox: Celebrating the Greening of the Earth by Ellen Jackson, illustrated by Jan Davey Ellis. The Spring Equinox tells the history and traditions of spring equinox around the world in short stories. It tells of the Iranian celebration of No Ruz, the Russian Maslenita, Passover, and Easter. Good for slightly older children, maybe 5 or 6 and up. | Buy on Amazon

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd. This may not be an Easter book, but it's one of my favorite children's books and you can't have too many bunnies for the holiday. In The Runaway Bunny, a little bunny wants to run away from his mother but mama lovingly thwarts every one of the little bunny's plans. Hurd's imaginative illustrations are beautifully painted and feature a hidden bunny-child and a mama coming searching. Z has enjoyed locating the hidden bunny in the pictures since we first found the book when she was two years old. | Buy on Amazon - Jennifer

Is your child's pretend play routine becoming a little pedestrian? Introduce some fascinating mythical creatures into their repertoire with these wonderful (and sometimes chilling) books.


The Hidden Folk: Selkies are women who live in seal skins and come ashore to play on the beach; if one's skin is captured, she is bound to the one who took it until she can recover it. Elves come in light (good) and dark (evil) varieties; you can tell dark elves from light ones because their "backs are as hollow as bread troughs." A water horse or kelpie takes the form of a horse (albeit one with several giveaway features) but drags unsuspecting riders into the water to drown and eat them. Enter the world of flower fairies, gnomes, dwarves, river sprites, and more with this captivating book by Lise Lunge-Larson. Traditional (but often enhanced) stories are prefaced by individual pages describing the type of creature in a naturalistic voice and setting up the story to follow. Highly recommended, and coincidentally the book you might wish to be most careful with - it contains some truly spooky stuff. Our four-year-old Z adores it. | $14 on Amazon.com

Favorite Tales of Monsters and Trolls: This classic three-story paperback from Random House is out of print, but was widely circulated - check your local used bookstore, local library, or buy it used on Amazon.com. The illustrations in this book are fascinating, with grotesquely beautiful illustrations teeming with little folk who bear no relation to the stories (The Three Billy Goats Gruff among them) but fill the background and react to the actions of the characters (fleeing a tree being chopped down, for example). | Price varies


Trouble with Trolls: We went on a Jan Brett kick this holiday season, thanks to her wonderful Christmas Treasury. This story, contained in the larger volume, is also available on its own, and is winter- but not Christmas-specific. Brett enjoys taking "hidden folk" - trolls specifically - and endowing them with a specific set of cultural mores and personality traits. Brett's trolls are grasping and needy, childlike but still slightly menacing, yet outsmarted by a resourceful and self-confident young girl. Benign and accessible, with the kid coming out on top by using her wits. | $7 on Amazon.com


The Tomten and the Fox: It was Brett who got us interested in tomte(n) - gnomelike creatures who protect farmyard animals from nocturnal predators - but it's Astrid Lindgren's (yes, of Pippi Longstocking fame) adaptation of a Scandanavian poem on that topic that really has us transfixed. A tomte is the soul of the farm's first occupant, and was provided with a bowl of porridge by the inhabitants each night, either to eat himself or to share with animals that came looking for easy prey. I suspect that the tradition was a useful one because a fox (as in the story) would discover the bowl of porridge before making it into the henhouse, fill its belly, and then be less inclined to risk life and limb going after the farmer's chickens. Fascinating, and a fun book to look at and read. Tomte, also called nisse, are also featured in The Hidden Folk, above. This book is peaceful, poetic, and slightly eerie; this tomte is hollow-looking but takes a paternal approach. | $7 on Amazon.com

The Mermaid's Treasure: Although it looks to be (and is) one of those odd, puffy-plastic-covered books which hardly seems to have a credited author (it's Stephanie Peters), this book is full of mermaid lore pitched at pre-teens on down through enough lift-the-flaps to keep kids busy for hours of exploratory reading. Full of detailed, meticulously painted maps of mermaid lands and cities, encyclopedic reviews of mermaid paraphernalia, and several mermaid stories, it also catalogs mermaid types from around the world, and doesn't neglect to put them in the context of their originating cultures. | A steal at $13.50 on Amazon.com, down from $20 list.

- Jeremiah

This isn't exactly the most representative video from the NORAD Tracks Santa project, which puts St. Nick in a series of Google Earth panoramas and overlays official-sounding military reports of sightings of him on his journey around the world tonight. But I just realized that it's only a matter of time before our currently space-obsessed four-year-old asks me whether the crew of the International Space Station gets a visit from Santa or not, and now I have my answer.



Poke around the site here. NORAD also has audio recordings of the "Yes, Virginia" letters - the 1987 letter written to her local newspaper in 1897, and the letter the editors wrote back. We think that's pretty awesome. - Jeremiah

Jane and the Dragon is a CG animated series based on the children's books of Martin Baynton. This DVD contains five episodes: "Tests and Jests," "Tooth Fairy," "Jester Justice," "A Dragon's Tail," and "Shall We Dance." I appreciate the strong feminine role model of Jane who works to become a knight without emphasizing that it's not typically something that girls can't do.

Z, at age four, was concerned that they were a little violent in the sword fighting scenes. "Mama, I don't think this is appropriate," she said to me, "they aren't being very nice." This might just come down to a matter of your family's treatment of cartoon violence, but be sure to censor the Tooth Fairy episode if you have little ones in the house who believe in the tooth fairy - Jane plays the tooth fairy for the dragon and tells the dragon over and over that the tooth fairy doesn't exist. In the end, there's a bit of mystery as to whether the tooth fairy exists but I'm not sure it will override the repetitive claims that she doesn't, and frankly, I was pretty irritated that they dropped that bomb on my daughter before she'd even lost her first tooth.

You can buy the Jane and the Dragon DVD and Jane and the Dragon books on Amazon.com. - Jennifer