Baseball Bats for Christmas by Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak, illustrated by Vladyana Krykorka.

Arvaarluk, the narrator of this story, is a seven year old Inuit boy who lived in 1955 in the far north, “way up at the north end of Hudson Bay—smack dab on the Arctic Circle,” where there are no “standing-ups”, commonly known as trees. And then one day the supply helicopter brought something rather strange just in time for Christmas.

“But there were the things he had brought, sitting on the snowbank in front of Arvaaluk’s hut. They were green and had spindly branches all over.
‘What are they?’ Jack asked.
‘Standing-ups,’ Peter said, confidently. ‘I have seen them in books at the church. Father Didier showed them to us.’
‘What are they for?’ Yvo asked.
Peter shrugged his shoulders and replied, ‘I don’t know.’
They did not have too long to wonder about them, of course. Christmas was coming. There were things to be done.There was church to go to at midnight.”

I love this true (?) story from author Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak’s Canadian childhood memories of Christmas in the north of Canada. It gives children a way to see that not everyone celebrates Christmas in exactly the same way and that not everyone sees even the simple things we use and enjoy every day in exactly the same way. Creativity and thinking outside the box are valuable aspects of what we get from the stories we read. In fact, this one reminds me of the family stories of Patricia Polacco and Cynthia Rylant, except this one is set in a place that is entirely foreign to most American and even Canadian children.