I chose to read this with my students (Kindergarteners) wanting primarily to expand their conception of what Christmas can look like within the traditions of different families. It’s an atypical but excellent Christmas story, and it can be fully enjoyed all year long there’s no need to wait for Christmas to enjoy this book. A child makes a mistake, thinking it’s worse than it is, goes to confess, sees that the situation is not so dire, and the adults are understanding and don’t scold but find a way to rectify the situation. I love how both the children and adults respond, especially given that in real life things might have gone an entirely different way.

The expressions on everyone’s faces and the colors used are just perfect. It also doesn’t hurt that I love tamales and it was interesting to see this family make them – two batches as it turns out.

Also, it’s interesting to read about a different (for me) kind of Christmas tradition. This is a wonderful family story, a special story about a young girl’s mistake and the funny and sweet and mature way everyone deals with it, and my kind of holiday story: one where the holiday itself is peripheral and therefore doesn’t make me melancholy. He divides his time between Berkeley, California and his hometown of Fresno. In 1999, he received the Literature Award from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the Author-Illustrator Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association, and the PEN Center West Book Award for Petty Crimes. In 1997, because of his advocacy for reading, he was featured as NBC’s Person-of-the-Week. For ITVS, he produced the film “The Pool Party,” which received the 1993 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Film Excellence. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry International, and Poetry, which has honored him with the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Award and by featuring him in the interview series Poets in Person.

Gary Soto is the author of eleven poetry collections for adults, most notably New and Selected Poems, a 1995 finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award.

Too many tamales