The Fifteenth Anniversary Edition of The True Story of Santa Claus and His Christmas Mission,
by Robert Sullivan, with drawings by Glenn Wolff, design by J Porter But more important: Kids clapped their mittens and families throughout the land took into their homes (and into their hearts) a book that Jim Doherty of Smithsonian magazine called “a milestone in the literature of Christmas.”
Now, 15 Ch
ristmases later, Skyhorse Publishing brings back into print what Publishers Weekly called in a starred review “a charming new Christmas classic.” This elegant hardcover re-issue features all of the lavish full-color Glenn Wolff illustrations of the original, all of extraordinary visual proofs of the elfin community and its good works, all of the twists and turns of the narrative (as bolstered by testimony of experts, including famous personages such as Sir Edmund Hillary and Arctic explorer Will Steger)—in short, all of the magic. There had never been anything like Flight of the Reindeer. Many writers had approached the irresistible Santa Claus story in a variety of ways, but none had tried to probe the reasons behind it. This would prove to be the eternal value of Flight of the Reindeer. The science was fascinating, the adventures were exciting, the discoveries and revelations were fun. But it was the larger message—the moral of the story, as they say—that resonated then, and resonates today. The critics saw this. Publishers Weekly continued that this was “a delightful, constantly surprising book,” and the writer Melissa Fay Greene called it “magnificent—an amazingly beautiful, magical book.” Thomas Keneally wrote: “At last a writer of great charm brings to bear on a myth which ought to be objective reality the graphic imagination and the narrative skill the subject deserves.” People magazine and Entertainment Weekly joined in the praises, and in the The Tampa Tribune and Times, the critic Julie Empric summed up the view of many: “Most readers of this book, young and old, will gladly suspend their disbelief and let their imaginations take flight with the reindeer . . . A wonderful, timeless, successful adventure in belief.”
