Forget the partridge, the pear tree and the turtle doves and imagine instead days of Christmas on each of which there arrives a children's book, the sort which, in addition to making an attractive seasonal present, is guaranteed to give continuing pleasure well into the New Year. From the hundreds of volumes currently available here are twelve to entrance a young readership - and to de- light an older one as well.
Start, appropriately, with Michael Foreman's Nursery ,Rhymes (Walker, £14.99 in UK), a collection of two hundred classics of the genre, dazzlingly given new life in Foreman's witty and colourful illustrations. No introduction to the potential fun of language can be more entertaining; no sequence of double-page spreads more engagingly alive with laughter, nonsense and mystery.
Some rhymes in Foreman's collection reappear in Shirley Hughes's Mother and Child Treasury (Collins, £14.99 in UK), but the emphasis here is on material for a slightly older readership. The thematic brief of the book is interpreted so as to allow for an impressive range of poetry and prose, much of it creating wonderful possibilities for reading aloud: try Eleanor Farjeon's "The Sea-Baby" as a special bedtime treat.
The Childhood Collection Ten Complete Picture Classics (Heinemann, £19.99 in UK) offers three hundred pages of old (and newer) favourites. Revisit nostalgically the house being built for Eeyore or re-live the swaggerings of Mr Toad, both with Shepard's illustrations; enjoy the juxtaposition of Alison Uttley's domesticated world of "The Squirrel, the Hare and the Little Grey Rabbit" and the more sinister domains of Maurice Sendak's "A Kiss for Little Bear".
The pleasures of pastoral are effectively explored in Dick King- Smith's Countryside Treasury (Collins, £14.99 in UK), the sources being sufficiently diverse to include Charlotte's Web, Jude the Obscure and the poetry of Frost, Housman and Masefield. Christian Birmingham's numerous illustrations convey an appropriately rustic, sometimes arcadian, atmosphere, subtly evoking seasonal change in their colours and textures.
The first five chapters of Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, considerably abridged, provide the content for Inga Moore's The River Bunk and Other Stories (Walker, £14.99 in UK); here is another idyll, picturesquely captured in Moore's shimmering landscapes of flora, fauna and foliage. Yet another re-telling of the best known fairy tales is justified when, as with the selection of eight in Adele Geras's Beauty and the Beast and Other Stories (Puffin, £6.99 in UK), the prose has its own distinctive freshness.
Here are such favourites as "Hansel and Gretel", "Rapunzel" and "Bluebeard", with artwork by Louise Brierley which captures the magical terror of the Grimm and Perrault originals.
The colours in Fiona Waters' The Brave Sister (Bloomsbury, £12.99 in UK) are brighter the surroundings more lush, for this is an "Arabian Nights" tale, set at the court of Persia's sultan. Danuta Mayer's illustrations, in the style of gold-edged eastern miniatures, are vividly exotic, but without overpowering the human story of the courageous young woman at the heart of events.
In what has been a very rich year for anthologies, Michael Rosen's Classic Poetry (Walker, £14.99 in UK) casts a special spell, not least through Paul Howard's accompanying illustrations. "Classic" here is "a way of saying that you will meet poems that have lasted for many years"; but even the most familiar of the poems springs to new life in Howard's artwork, whether in his eerie exterior for De La Mare's "The Listeners" or the ornate richness of the double-page spread for Browning's "My Last Duchess".
In Brian Patten's The Puffin Book of Utterly Brilliant Poetry (Puffin, £12.99 in UK), the focus is exclusively on contemporary work, more particularly on ten writers often - too dismissively - seen as "children's poets". Thus, we have, among others, Milligan and McGough, Agard and Zephaniah and, especially excellent, Charles Causley, each illustrated by a different artist; the overall effect is of robust vitality and vigour.
St with Emily Dickinson's "Will There Really Be A Morning?" and ending with Dylan Thomas's "And Death Shall Have No Dominion", The Oxford Treasury of Time Poems (Oxford, £14.99 in UK) is an engrossing poetic journey through time past, present and to come. The editors, Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark, aided by ten different illustrators, have assembled a remarkably poignant sequence of writing; here is much to remind us that "To Everything There Is a Season" (and that is here as well).
And, finally, lest we forget among the gift wrapping and unwrapping what Christmas is really about, give a thought to Lois Rock's Best-Loved Parables (Lion, £9.99 in UK) and Philip and Victoria Tebbs's Best-Loved Carols (Lion, £10.99 in UK). The former re-tells some of the most popular gospel stories in an idiom which, without over-simplification, makes the biblical originals attractively accessible. The latter provides words, music and accompanying biblical commentary or fifteen of the "best-loved carols", ending - how else? -with "We Wish You a Merry Christmas". And that's how we end, too.