Gyo Fujikawa: The First Children's Illustrator I Fell In Love With
It happened the night before Christmas
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My favorite day of the year is the night before Christmas. I prefer it to Christmas Day, always have. I enjoy the anticipation and wondering—the twinkling excitement of what’s to come. It’s also the night I first fell in love with a book.
Every year, on Christmas Eve, my parents read me The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore. The iconic holiday poem, originally titled "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (1822), has charmed readers for hundreds of years and has many different illustrated interpretations. Ours was a 1961 picture book illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa.
There’s a good chance I loved other books before this one, but I don’t remember them. The only other book I remember from when I was very little was My Goodnight Book (1981) by Eloise Wilkin, a sweet but monotonous story about a little girl’s bedtime routine. I only remember it because my parents read it to me ad nauseam (and I still own it). But The Night Before Christmas was different. Most of the year, it lived in a dusty old box in the attic with all the Christmas decorations. It only came out during the holiday, and we only read it at night on Christmas Eve. It was our special, festive family tradition, one that I’ve continued with my children.
As a child, I found Moore’s famous poem comforting. I had mixed feelings about Santa. He was a fantastical figure I adored but also feared. I mean, he’s always watching me? And he sneaks into my house at night while I’m asleep to leave me presents (or coal if I’ve been bad!). Santa is kind of a weird dude. But The Night Before Christmas assuaged my anxiety over St. Nick, especially the reassuring line:
“A wink of his eye and a twist of his head. Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.”
Now, as an adult reading it to my children, my uneasy feeling isn’t toward Santa but toward Clement C. Moore, a racist who owned slaves. Still, even as a child, it was less about Moore’s poem and more about Fujikawa’s enchanting illustrations.
I remember falling in love with the pictures before the story even began. When you open the book, you’re greeted by a soft, snuggly, snowy Christmas Eve night. A stunning cross-section of the house gives a sneak peek at the family right before Santa arrives. The stockings are hung by the chimney with care, the children are snug in their beds while visions of sugar plums dance in their heads, and the parents are about to settle their brains for a long winter’s nap. Of course, if you’ve never read the story before, you don’t know these delightful details, but once you do, it’s fun to go back to this spread and think about them.
As a child, I loved the three lively page turns of Santa’s arrival as he flies through the beautiful—midnight blue, then pink, then blue again—sky in his sleigh with his reindeer as the bright full moon hovers over him. And the spread where we see the many sides of Santa: mischievous and silly with his cherry nose, droll little mouth, and little round belly. But my favorite was of the children dreaming of dancing sugar plums. It captures the indulgent fantasy of Christmas Day that I felt so acutely as a child (and was often let down by).
Looking at Fujikawa’s pictures, I realized for the first time that someone was behind them, and I took note of her name to search for more books with her magical pictures. Thinking back, this was unusual. Most of the time, I didn’t acknowledge the authors and illustrators of my favorite books. Sadly, despite Fujikawa’s commercial success and popularity among children, she remained largely unknown (and still does). This is partly because she was a product of a different time when there weren’t many celebrity children’s authors and illustrators, but also, she was an Asian American woman; sexism and racism contributed to her invisibility.
