Mac Barnett Sleighs

I’m sure you’ve seen it. When Mac Barnett announced that he and Jon Klassen had a Substack, I took a gander. Sure I did. And damned if it wasn’t good. Real good. Mac and Jon have a way of thinking deeply about children’s books in ways that are sometimes familiar yet always have a thought or a take that is wholly original. Does that make sense?

Anyway, Mac’s into Santa these days. I’m sure you’ve seen Jon and Mac’s recent challenge to stores to create a better window display for How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? than they did. So when Lizzie Goodell with Penguin Young Readers said I could lob questions in the general direction of Mac’s head, there was only one thing I wanted to talk about.

I know it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet, but we are friggin’ talking about Santa today. As my 13-year-old daughter would say, sleigh.

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Betsy Bird: Mac! So good to talk to you today. Many congrats on the publication of Santa’s First Christmas (illustrated by Sydney Smith). Naturally you already touched on this particular character in last year’s How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? (illustrated by Jon Klassen). I’ll delve into the greater ramifications of Santa in a bit here, but just to start us off, where did this particular idea come from?

Mac Barnett: This is a picture book about a character celebrating Christmas for the first time. It just so happens that this character is Santa Claus. And not, like, Baby Santa Claus. This is white-bearded old-man Santa Claus, centuries into Santa-ing. The idea of casting Santa as a naïf was appealingly counterintuitive to me—but it makes sense. Even though Santa is (obviously) closely associated with Christmas, his big day is really Christmas Eve. And he doesn’t celebrate—he’s working. So watching Santa learn about Christmas traditions felt interesting and funny, but also potentially full of pathos too.

BB: The real question I want to ask you is about Santa himself. A lot of picture book authors do a holiday title but they don’t usually return to the same subject unless it’s a sequel. What sets your Santa books apart is how incredibly different the two are from one another. The first was a delightful and wry examination of all the contradictions and oddities of the character while this one hits you in the gol durn heart. So why the return to Santa? What about the jolly guy keeps luring you back?

Mac: I love Christmas and I love Santa, and it may not be much more complicated than that. But if I were, for a minute, to play my own literary critic/psychoanalyst/psychoanalytic literary critic, I would note that I’ve always been interested in the porous borders between fiction and fact, lies and truth, and the imaginative and the empirical—and that Santa traverses these worlds in particularly interesting ways. But that’s looking at my work after the fact—it’s not what I’m thinking about when I sit down and write. And like I said, I love Christmas. I own a bright red turtleneck. The Santa books were probably inevitable.

BB: I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on holiday-related picture books as a whole. They seem to take up a very specific place in a family dynamic. I know a lot of people who keep the beloved holiday classics that they read as children in the family to read to their own children and grandchildren later on. The good ones live on in a way that even picture book classics outside of the holiday-sphere don’t quite enjoy. So how the heck do you write a good one? And what’s your take on the genre?

Mac: Growing up, my Christmas books definitely had special status. They were stored in boxes with all our ornaments and decorations. The books came out when we got our tree, and they got packed up again when my mom took down all the Christmas stuff and dragged the tree to the curb—first thing in the morning on December 26th. I didn’t have any other books like that: we read them repeatedly and loved them intensely for a few weeks, then put them into deep storage and pretty much forgot about them, only to be joyously reunited with them eleven months later. Those picture books were both familiar—imbued with all the warmth and coziness of Christmases past—but also different, because I was different, and a good story changes with its reader. Is that a take on the genre? I want to write something that gets put in a box with a broken nutcracker and a plastic Garfield wearing a Santa hat that nobody can bear to throw away.

BB: Is there anything you tried specifically to avoid when writing your two Santa books? Tropes you disliked or simply didn’t want to touch on? Or is that not even a factor when you’re coming up with a picture book idea?

Mac: I spent a long time thinking about this one—because I read and dislike picture books all the time, but when I’m actually sitting down and writing, I’m guided by some combination of enthusiasm for the idea and interest in the craftwork of telling a picture book story. I don’t know if this was always true for me or will always be true for me—and I do believe that writing is a way of reacting to the world, and especially to the stories I’m reading. But this was a very interesting question to me. One thing I guess I’m not really interested in when it comes to Santa is exploring “belief,” and especially a crisis of belief. There’s a lot to be explored there, but it’s not where my interest lies.

BB: You strike me as a fella who probably had his eye on Sydney Smith for a while. I mean, the man’s a blooming genius on the page. How was Sydney approached for this particular project? And was he your #1 pick from the start or did you come to him by and by? After all, this is a very different kind of book than the ones he usually does.

Mac: Oh yeah, I’ve known Sydney for years and wanted to work with him even before we met. He’s one of the great living painters and we’re very lucky to have him in picture books. But asking him to illustrate Santa’s First Christmas wasn’t my idea. Our editor, Tamar Brazis, suggested sending Sydney the manuscript. I thought it was an inspired choice, and feel that way even more so now. At various points, the text makes some very heavy demands of the pictures. I’m thinking particularly about a sequence in the middle of the book where Santa and the elves string the North Pole with lights, count to three, and then—after a page turn—turn the lights on. It’s a big moment in the book, emotionally, and it’s basically asking the illustration to perform a magic trick—to dazzle the reader with light and color and beauty. Sydney pulls it off so gracefully—he makes it look effortless, but it is a very very difficult series of spreads. The last few spreads are set up to be even more challenging—an extended description of a Christmas feast that is sumptuous and cozy and joyful and wistful. It’s a time where the text moves into a different register, and the pictures must do the same, and wow did Sydney ever nail it.

BB: You’ve paired with not one but two different Canadian artists for these books. This leads one to wonder what it is about the Canadians that makes them particularly adept at Santa-related fare. Do you have any insights on the matter?

Mac: I am not an American who feels comfortable generalizing about other countries but one thing I do feel ok saying about Canadians, and which may be relevant here, is that they are located north of us. 

BB: Finally, any chance of a third trip to St. Nick’s? Good things come in threes after all. Failing that, what else is coming out from you in 2025?

Mac: I wasn’t going to mention this earlier but now I have to: Santa’s First Christmas is my third book about Santa. Jack and Santa was the first, and the Santa in that book is a real blowhard, very unlike the Santa in the other two books. So, yes, good things do come in threes! Collect ‘em all!

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Blast. He’s right. I completely forgot about that Jack book. That’s on me, folks!

In the meantime, I am happy to report that Santa’s First Christmas is already out (and How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? was long since released) so there is literally nothing stopping you from getting your hands on them both right now. Thanks to Mac for taking the time to thoughtfully answer my questions, and thanks too to Lizzie Goodell and the team at Penguin Young Readers for putting it all together!

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Interviews