Big Bob and the Winter Holiday Potato

Daniel Pinkwater's Big Bob and the Winter Holiday Potato is a gleefully absurdist early reader from the Hello Reader! series. Big Gloria objects to her class's Santa Claus play and lobbies for a substitute hero — Potato Claus, a daytime gift-giver who lets kids pick presents from a catalog and skips the naughty-or-nice judgment. It's vintage Pinkwater: gently subversive, genuinely funny, and completely without meanness. Families with strong traditional Christmas convictions should know the premise pokes fun at Santa-centered holiday plays, though it does so without hostility. The plot is thin even by early-reader standards, but for fans of offbeat humor, Jill Pinkwater's illustrations and the book's cheerful silliness make it a keeper.