If you read this book aloud, it will only be fitting to pronounce the grande dame's name as ''Ahntie Claus.'' The story is simple and none too surprising. She emanates genteel flamboyance, and has a nose so surgically sharpened you can imagine getting a Young Sophie's Auntie Claus herself is like an Erte figure in red-and-white fur, with a tasteful whirl of feathers atop her pointed Art Deco hood. That will make your eyeteeth ache: a gargantuan Santa head bobs through the night sky like a float broken free from the Macy's parade the North Pole is studded with curvaceous, colorful minarets a giant snowĭome serves as a surveillance device and Santa's elves wear eccentric two-pronged headpieces that owe a clear aesthetic debt to the furniture designs of Philippe Starck. High-mindedness aside, if you're the type of parent who can allow your kids to indulge in an occasional candy cane pigout without fretting over nutrition, ''Auntie Claus'' is well worth a splurge. The candelabra, gilded furnishings and small forest of ornamented trees that decorate her family's penthouse apartment. Toward the end of ''Auntie Claus,'' the story's young heroine, Sophie Kringle, announces that she has come to understand that ''it is far better to give than it is to receive.'' She does this standing amid Have it all and a light overlay of moral sentiment that doesn't exactly resonate with sincerity amid the exuberant excess. ''Auntie Claus'' is packed with all the simultaneously wonderful and troublesome elements of a contemporary uptown holiday season - great gobs of visual stimulation, spectacular displays of material wealth, precocious children who Holiday windows at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Otherwise, take this first flash of yellow as a caution light.Įven if children's books aren't on your shopping list this season, you may have already run across the adventures of Primavera's ''Auntie Claus.'' Dioramas based on the book's illustrations fill this year's Red or green but the bright yellow of taxi traffic. N Elise Primavera's color-drenched pastiche of a Yuletide tale, the first hue that really strikes you is not a traditionalist's Christmas
San Diego: Silver Whistle/ Harcourt Brace & Company. Written and illustrated by Elise Primavera. Other Children's Books Reviewed This Month
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