As I had promised, when it comes to Christmas gift recommendations this year, there will be no toy in sight on this blog!

But there are plenty of other wonderful children’s Christmas presents worth mentioning here, books coming first to mind for me, a declared bookworm and avid reader!

We have been reviewing a number of books and games this month and here are some titles that caught our attention or gave us the giggles:

Norman, the Slug Who Saved Christmas, by Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet

We hadn’t heard of Sue Hendra before receiving her latest book, even if she is the illustrator of other hilarious titles like Barry, The Fish With Fingers, Supertato and N0-Bot, The Robot With No Bottom!

Norman, the Slug Who Saved Christmas is this year feel-good children’s Christmas book which will amuse young children and parents alike and bring the festive cheer into our homes.

Even if the book is designed for younger children, Emma found it truly fun to read and it sits on her nightstand now, along with other favourites.

The paperback version of the book retails on Amazon at £3.49 and delivery is free if you are a Prime member.

A truly amazing book, appropriate for children aged 5 and over, is the personalised The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home, from the same company that brought to press the LostMyName series.

The book is a delight to personalise, thanks to the apt website and allows the parent or carer to introduce the name and gender of the child, choose the skin tone and hair colour that suits the respective child best and input details of the child’s home address. It then presents the grown up with a bird’s eye view Google map of the street on which the child lives, giving the book amazing accuracy, known best as magic in a child’s eyes :-).

The book comes with a personalised dedication, which of course, can be altered according to preference:

“Dear…,

The universe is big, and wonderful, and waiting for you to explore.

We hope you enjoy this adventure, and many more to follow.”

I attach the video which presents the book and makes the Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home truly magical to possess:

We found this a much more appropriate read for Emma’s age. She was transfixed with the journey’s details and could not get her head around the fact that our door number and the picture of our street can be in a book, alongside her name! Emma also found the glow in the dark cover letters extremely cool.

A really good way to surprise school-aged children at Christmas, especially when they are still young enough to appreciate this sort of things!

The personalised book takes less than 10 minutes to put together and sells for £19.99 on the website. Shipping is free.

The one book that Emma truly identified with is the latest of the Tara Binns’ series, the Double Choc Doc.

We have known of the Tara Binns books since April this year, when we reviewed the Eagle-Eyed Pilot. We had found the books well-written and appealing to little girls who dream of great things so when we saw a competition offering the latest book plus a play doctor’s outfit popping up on their Facebook page, we had to enter it!

Luckily for us, we got to win the bundle and Emma has been happily offering consultations to her dollies and telling to everybody who is willing to listen that a sore throat gets better when you eat ice-cream, as doctor Tara advises in the book :-).

The book was taken into school last week, as they have had a hospital play theme and I do hope it encouraged loads of other little girls to dream big and imagine themselves as responsible doctors!

 The book sells for £6.87 on Amazon and again, for Prime members, delivery is free. If you have a little girl in the house, do add this book to her pile of pink presents. It may well change her destiny!

Another book that had us in stitches and we would recommend entirely not only for its funny story line but also for the wealth of its vocabulary is The Nonsense Show by Eric Carle.

The book is suitable for young and older children and presents a host of conversation openers, as I observed in Emma’s case.

Our favourite page has to be the last one, Emma has asked me to read it several times, every time we had it as a bedtime story and I am sure her wee brain has registered loads of impressive new words:

The book sells on Amazon for £8.10 plus delivery.

The last item on tonight list is Parragon’s Metal Puzzles from Professor Murphy’s Emporium of Entertainment.

This is the first time we get this sort of family game and because Emma is still young, we did find it quite challenging. It must be maybe a girl’s thing as well, Emma and I took forever to understand what was required of us while Alex got straight to untangling the puzzles and seemed to enjoy the activity quite a lot!

I do think that this sort of game is definitely for more technical minds and would probably attract a boy’s attention sooner than a girl’s but it did make for a fun half an hour on the living room floor that evening!

The game was offered to us through the Parragon Book Buddy Blogger scheme we are part of and sells on Amazong for £5.99.

What is your favourite pass time on Christmas day, would you rather grab a good book or play a family game?