"Christmas was just around the corner, and Puddle hadn't seen a single snowflake yet."
It's one of the last "Toot & Puddle" books, with the little pig hopefully pleading the sky for a snowstorm. But his friend Puddle - also a pig - is busy devising "the best present ever." There's a nice montage of the fun they've had enjoying his past Christmas gifts - like a red sled, or a real raft for the pond. Unfortunately, this year he's stumped. "What could he possibly give good old Puds for Christmas?"
Puddle is pondering the same question, and remembering all the Christmas gifts HE'D presented to Toot. (There was a hand-made sweater, and one year even an enormous plum pudding.) But there's a funny digression when he telephones his cousin Opal - also a pig - for advice. She recommends a homemade doll - very sweetly - because she seems like an especially feminine pig. She's shown dressed in pink, wearing pink shoes, talking on a pinkish-red phone while imagining lots of pink dolls!
It should be said that Holly Hobbie is a very talented illustrator. She crafts her watercolors with fairy-tale perfection, filling them with sharp lines detailing the pigs' world with depth and perspective - and always tinting them with the perfect color scheme. For example, to set the mood, when Puddle walks through a bare December forest, there's a tangle of white aspen branches in the foreground, over grey and white bricks in a low stone wall, matching the grey condensation from Puddle's cold breath. There's bare earth below him, but there's still something warm and inviting about its twig-speckled yellow. And in the center of the drawing is the bright red of the little pig's jacket - and of course, his pink piggy skin.
Hobbie sometimes delivers several small illustrations on a single page, or creates a jumble showing what the pigs are thinking about. But she also creates several gorgeous two-page spreads showing the forest when the Christmas snowfall finally comes. "The path through the woods became a magical journey," she writes, and the illustration shows a perfect winter wonderland. There's enormous tufts of snow in round clumps on the giant evergreen trees. And at the center of the drawing ski the two little pigs - smiling happily.
I love how the book just ambles simply through a winter day in the lives of the pigs, without bogging down in the drama of their quest for a gift. But at the end of the book everything ends happily, with the two pigs both ignoring Opal's advice, and giving a gift that they'd chosen themselves. And there's something especially poignant about the gift that Puddle gives his friend Toot.
He'd drawn a hand-made illustration of their wonderful day together in the snow.