Hidden Collections: Holiday Books for Kids

Are you looking for a way to teach your child about an upcoming holiday, or celebrate the season while enjoying a good book?

At CPL we have a collection of holiday books in the Children’s Library, in the aisle where the picture books end and the nonfiction books begin; and it is made up almost entirely of picture books themed for popular holidays, ranging from Ramadan to Valentine’s Day and many others in between.

Each holiday has a unique sticker on the binding of each book to indicate where it goes. Additional holiday books (minus the “holiday” sticker on the spine) can be found in neighboring collections, and below is a handy guide for how to locate those using the catalog search here on our website.

Looking for more than just picture books? Searching by subject is an excellent way to find virtually all books in the library featuring a specific topic. For instance, if you search “Diwali” in the catalog, you will get 65 results. One way to narrow this down is to scroll down the “Filter your results by...” column along the left side of the catalog until you reach “Topic.” Clicking on this will give you a list of subject headings pulled from the items in your search results. Clicking on “Divali” will narrow your results to 21 down from 65.

Another way to go about this is to select a title you are interested in and click on either the subject under the “Subject and genre” heading or “full details” at the bottom of the “About” section. Here you will be able to see a list of subject headings assigned to this item, one of which might be “Divali — Juvenile literature” which will give the reader a list of similar titles.

We also often publish booklists featuring books about upcoming holidays, so keep your eyes out for seasonal staff recommendations.

As each holiday approaches, demand for these titles becomes high and many will be checked out. To avoid this, the best practice is to put the books you want on hold early so you can enjoy them when seasonally appropriate.

If the books you want to read are checked out or there is a long wait on a title you want, hoopla and Libby may provide some other readily-accessible e-book and e-audio options.