Lost Recipe! Cookies for Santa by Johanna Tarkela

It's the week before Christmas. Everyone at the North Pole is getting ready for the big day.

Everyone but SANTA.

Santa is in a funk.

It seems he cannot find his copy of the Kringle Family Cookbook; ergo, he can't make the Chocolate Krinkle Cookies he always gives to his staff--elves, reindeer, mice....

Christmas is canceled!

But meanwhile, in the marginally warmer clime of Boston, U.S.A., there are two kids, Benton and Abigail, out Christmas shopping with their mom, and at Abigail's urging, they stop off at the downtown library to find a Christmas cookie recipe book. Abigail spies a dusty but intriguing old volume and checks it out. The perceptive Abigail quickly figures out that Santa's lost recipe book has somehow found its way to the stacks of the Boston Public Library and that she herself must save Christmas by baking a bodacious batch of Chocolate Krinkle Cookies!

But there's one hitch! The recipe calls for elfin chocolate, an ingredient that no one seems to be selling. For such a culinary question--Who you gonna call?

"I have an idea!" said Mom. "America's Test Kitchens are down the street. They'll know what to do!"

Is that august collection of culinary skills up to the Krinkle Cookie challenge?

It looks as if this will not be The Year Without A Santa Claus after all in Johanna Tarkela's Cookies for Santa: The Story of How Santa's Favorite Cookie Saved Christmas (Sourcebooks, 2019). While this modern version of the evergreen "helping Santa" theme is well retold here, Tarkela's  lively and jolly illustrations really sparkle--lovely, merry, and bright.

Share this one with Phyllis McGinley's heartwarming classic, The Year without a Santa Claus or the tasty top-seller, A World of Cookies for Santa: Follow Santa's Tasty Trip Around the World (see review here).