Merry Monsters Abound in Elmo's 12 Days of Christmas

When I was in first grade, my teacher brought in A Sesame Street Christmas on vinyl. I’ve loved the Muppets for as long as I can remember, and I was especially taken with the version of The 12 Days of Christmas that appeared on this album. So taken, in fact, that I begged my teacher to let me borrow it, and she agreed. I suspect I had thoughts of making a tape of the record, though since I can’t ever remember listening to it after that year, I don’t think that happened. And now I have a burning desire to see if I can get it on CD.

Anyway, the Sesame Street edition of 12 Days of Christmas was silly and personalized to reflect the wishes of the various characters. I vividly remember Cookie Monster was the first in the lineup and he got “one delicious cookie”. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I can look up the other verses, which gives me a great nostalgic rush. Two of the featured characters are Muppets I barely remember, but most are more iconic, and Bert, Ernie, Oscar, Count and Big Bird have especially appropriate gifts to recount: argyle socks, rubber duckies, rusty trashcans, counts a-counting (I guess he’s lonely?) and pounds of birdseed.

The board book Elmo’s 12 Days of Christmas similarly takes the basic structure of the song and uses it as the jumping-off point for a Sesame Street-specific song, with an emphasis on Elmo, who is so very popular with the toddler set. In this book written by Sarah Albee and illustrated by Maggie Swanson, Elmo appears on every page, mostly accompanied by generic monsters, though Grover and Cookie Monster put in appearances.

While the Sesame Street version from the 1970s concentrates largely on the personalities of the individuals involved, this book is a celebration of Elmo’s imagination. On the first day, we have Elmo decorating a tree, a very Christmassy scene. Most of the other illustrations have little to do with the season at hand but are fun to look at. Instead of “one delicious cookie,” we get “two yummy cookies”. “Three French friends” yields monsters in berets and mustaches; “four calling monsters” chat on the phone.

The most unseasonal of the days is seven, on which the monsters are swimming in a kiddie pool. Considering the fact that Sesame Street is in New York City, this is not a December scene. “Eight monsters milking,” which takes place out on a farm, also seems very summery. By the time we get to eleven and twelve, it feels Christmassy again, with “eleven monsters piping” in kilts and bagpipes, perhaps my favorite illustration, and “twelve monsters drumming” in red drummer uniforms.

Albee sticks as close as she can to the original song while still making it Elmo-specific. Nine of the twelve verses contain the word “monster(s)”, and in several cases, that’s the only word that is changed. I would say that the first Sesame Street version is more creative, but I like this Elmo edition better than several other knock-offs I’ve seen. You can easily write a custom 12 Days of Christmas around just about any subject out there. It’s Swanson’s pictures that make this sturdy book so fun for pre-readers, and if they happen to start singing about monsters dancing instead of ladies, this song-that-never-ends won’t make any less sense than it already does.