A guest post by Brad, dad to Rowan, 2 years

Recently Katie found a collection of children’s Christmas books from my childhood. It is a ‘long’ time ago but I think my favourite was The Santa Claus Book. It has a big smiling happy Santa face on the front and back covers and tells the familiar tale of Santa going about his business of delivering presents to all the children on his long list.

Santa’s list is pictured in the book and my Mum made sure we weren’t left out by writing my name and my brother’s name amongst the others. (You can see our names in this photo if you look carefully.)

Part way through his journey, Santa discovers a lost puppy chewing on his list. Santa tucks the puppy into his sack and does the rounds to find a home for him. Santa finds a stocking with a note about a lost puppy belonging to a little boy called Mike. Just when he is ready to return the puppy, Santa discovers that he is no longer in his sack. Santa looks and looks and finds the puppy, asleep in a dolls’ house. Santa tucks the puppy into Mike’s stocking and puts him next to Mike as he sleeps. When he wakes, he has his puppy back for Christmas.

The story brings back some great memories for me of happy family times in the weeks leading up to Christmas. We have shared this story with Rowan and reading it to him also reminds me of the how important it is to feel loved, safe and secure as a child (and beyond), just like Mike’s puppy.

Hard to believe that in the four months Lou and I have been doing our weekly ‘When We Were Little’ posts, we haven’t yet canvassed a Golden Book. We have some catching up to do!

One of my favourite Golden Books, and the one that probably has the strongest memories for me, is The Colour Kittens. It must have been given to me very early in my life, as the inscription on the front page reads ‘This book belongs to Katherine’, so it was written before my name was always shortened – which is for as long as I can remember…

The Colour Kittens is written by Margaret Wise Brown – author of Goodnight Moon. It’s interesting that one of the kittens is named ‘Hush’, which is a word that is also present and distinctive for me in Goodnight Moon (And a quiet old lady whispering ‘hush’!). Also similarly, the text has a lovely lilting rhythm.

Drifting in and out of rhyming verse, the words are very soothing:

Green as cats’ eyes,
Green as grass
By streams of water
Green as glass

The story follows Hush and Brush, who love to mix colours of paints, but don’t know how to make green. It is a lovely introduction to the idea of mixing colours – as we discover how the kittens make pink and orange and purple and – finally – green.

The illustrations by Alice and Martin Provensen do every justice to the underlying theme. Their style is very distinctive, stylised, and the use of colour is particularly stunning. Crisp shapes and unusual contrasts help to give the illustrations an amazing vibrancy. I find it amazing that the reproduction of the colours can be so vibrant, on the lightweight pages of a production that was made to be affordable to everyone.

The artwork of this book has, I’ve learnt, been inspiring for designers and artists. I read recently somewhere, I can’t find the link at the moment, about one particular designer’s continuing association of a hue of purple as ‘Color Kitten Purple’. A fitting tribute to the influence of a humble little Golden Book.

||The Colour Kittens available from Amazon||

You need go no further than Facebook to discover the cult following of this vintage Australian classic. Believe it or not, at last count Grug had 25,659 friends!

It would have been a rare Australian primary school in the 1980s that didn’t have a copy of some of the Grug books on their shelves. The first four books in the series by Ted Prior were first published in 1979, and the colours and design give it that unmissable 70s style.

Grug is a small creature who began life as the top of a Burrawong tree, which one day fell off, and gradually morphed into Grug. He has a unique view on the world; he’s a bit of a loner, but occasionally sets out to interact with the world in his own special way.

I remember taking some of these books home as readers, and have a very nostalgic feelings towards little Grug – he’s so industrious, but also so sensitive and considerate …

There were about 25 books in total published in the Grug series,

issued right up to the late 80s and early 90s. One of Grug’s many fans includes Australian author, Marcus Zusak, most famous for writing The Book Thief.