Putting first things first, they tidy up the house, with an unheralded sense of purpose motivating their actions: “Then we clean, clean, clean the windows,/wipe, wipe, wash them right./My dad shines in the windows’ light.” When their work is done, they head for the park for some batting practice, then to the movies where the boy gets to choose between films. It’s not melodramatic, but just a Saturday in which an African-American father and son immerse themselves in each other’s company when the woman of the house is away. There is something profoundly elemental going on in Smalls’s book: the capturing of a moment of unmediated joy. A promising bid for holiday bestsellerdom. Tall and slender in fur-trimmed red, Auntie Claus cuts as elegant a figure amidst the North Pole’s snowy bustle as she does in her sparsely appointed New York digs most of Primavera’s expansive scenes are underlit to add an air of mystery, and presided over by looming background figures: Santa, the Statue of Liberty, a huge, moon-faced snowman. When she catches sight of the Bad-Boys-And-Girls list, and finds her little brother’s name on it, she reacts with uncharacteristic, newly mustered compassion, erasing his name and adding her own in it’s place suddenly she’s sharing a stage with Auntie, who turns out to be Santa’s sister and, having learned that it is better to give than to receive (“the first and final rule,” as Auntie calls it), is whisked home just in time for Christmas. One year, Sophie stows away in Auntie Claus’s luggage, and ends up at the North Pole, pressed into hard service as an elf.

Smug little rich girl Sophie Kringle has a great-aunt who lives in high style atop the palatial Bing Cherry Hotel, vacating only for her mysterious annual “business trip” between Halloween and Valentine’s Day. A grand, if unsubtle, cousin to William Joyce’s Santa Calls (1993).

Auntie Claus by Elise Primavera