Sounds Like Christmas

Grandma is baking Christmas cookies, so she asks Lincoln and Georgia to decorate the tree. They put on the lights, and the garlands, and the balls, and the candy canes. Then Olivia runs upstairs and brings back a toy bird. She puts it on a branch, turns it on and it goes TWEET TWEET TWEET. “HA!” says Lincoln “I can beat that.” He runs to his room and gets his sound effects keychain, hangs it on the tree, and makes it go ZAP ZAP ZAP.

In no time the competition creates a cacophony, with the neighbour’s dog and eventually both Grandma and Grandpa yelling on top of the tree. Eventually Grandpa points out that no adults means no Christmas presents — but the kids point out that Santa is sure to come through for them, and they head off to go to finish off the Christmas cookies and to go bed to wait for Christmas morning.

Telling stories is what Robert Munsch does — and loves best. From the first time he stood in front of a group of children as a student teacher at a nursery school in 1972, his jaunty, animated presentation grabbed hold of the imaginations of his listeners and he hasn't let go since.

Before he puts a story to paper, Munsch spends up to three years telling, revising and fine-tuning the tale in front of his rapt audiences. “I figured out once that the stories the kids kept requesting came to two percent of my total output,” he says. But once he discovered how to capture the spontaneity of his narratives in written form, he was on his way to being a successful and sought-after author.

Munsch has published dozens of books in both Canada and the United States. His first efforts, Mud Puddle and The Dark, were published in 1979 and the runaway bestseller Love You Forever was first published in 1986. All of his characters are believably spunky, stubborn and endearing children, while his story lines tend to challenge conventions and stereotypes.

Munsch describes his stories as “middle of the road taboo.” When he uses words like pee and underwear, “the kids go absolutely bananas.” As for the parents, “Eighty percent think it's really neat; the other twenty percent ask, 'How could you?'"

Robert Munsch lives in Ontario, Canada, and continues to perform his own tales — often without advance notice — for day care centers, schools, and libraries.