by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 15, 2010

A family takes their cat Henry to visit their church's nativity scene. And "As he licked the wet snow from his paws, he notices a box filled with dry straw…" The cat tries to curl up in the manger, until a little girl pulls the purring cat up and cuddles him. "No, dear," an older woman tells her. "As Mother Mary you hold the Baby Jesus, not a cat. There were no cats in the stable."

It's another funny children's picture book about Henry the cat, and this one describes the scenes of Christmas as seen through the cat's eyes.  Henry sniffs enthusiastically at a live lamb that's been brought for the nativity scene. The cat says "Mowl!" and the lamb says "Baa" - and soon the lamb is following Henry as though he were a shepherd. The lamb's owner laughs, and jokes to the family that "Instead of a sheepdog, it looks like you've got a sheepcat."


It's that kind of story. The children sing "O Little Town of Bethlehem." Henry the cat sings "Me-yow-y-yow meow meow." The cat's owner puts his hand over the cat's mouth. And an elderly woman laughs with delight.

But the illustrations are very pretty, with fuzzy white backgrounds showing a snowy night, and the soft faces of the children. The warm light inside houses becomes a yellow glow, and there's a mysterious brightness to the snow itself. Soon the cat has ventured off on its own, and it finds a world of white snow-covered trees.

The children travel the neighborhood singing Christmas carols, and at one house they encounter a barking dog. The dog frightens away the little lamb, who disappears into the dark. The lady leading the carolers tells the children they can't run off into the night to chase a lost lamb. It's up to Henry, the plucky Siamese cat, to track the lamb's trail through the snow.

Now the cat is off on its own, following a suspicious curve of paw prints to the back of a neighbor's house. There's real drama as "he walked on slowly in the growing darkness, and his whiskers pulled back as he felt the cold snow on his legs." There's a beautiful illustration of the cat looking across a snow-covered street, spotting a department store Santa Claus off in the distance. But the cat knows that a lamb wouldn't go anywhere near the noisy man ringing a bell!

Eventually there's a showdown with a hostile neighborhood cat - and Henry tricks it into a pile of snow. With the help from a neighborhood policeman, Henry escorts the lamb back where it belongs. And then everyone has a very special Christmas story to tell.

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