The 12 Birds of Christmas by Jodie McLeod, illustrated by Eloise Short

Title: The 12 Birds of Christmas

Author: Jodie McLeod, illustrated by Eloise Short

Genre: Christmas

Publisher: Wollemi Press

Published: 1^st October 2025

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 32

Price: $26.95

Synopsis: From the award-winning author and illustrator of The

Black Cockatoo With One Feather Blue comes this original rhyming read aloud about giving, community and sharing the Christmas spirit.

Guess, count and spot 12 of Australia’s most Christmassy

birds and flowers in this joyful celebration of Christmas in the Australian bush! Featuring 12 stunning bird portraits and a fun counting poem, readers will love using rhyming and visual clues to predict what number and bird will appear on the next page.

This beautiful-quality hardcover will be a delight for readers young and old for all the Christmases to come!

~*~

Christmas is coming and the twelve birds of Christmas in Australia are getting ready. Every Christmassy bird is coming together in their community to celebrate and share what they have. There aren’t many Australian Christmas books around, but it’s getting better. There are more coming out each year, and it’s great to see more coming out lately. As much as I love all the wintry, traditional stories, it’s really cool to see the same themes in an Australian context.

One of these recent books is The 12 Birds of Christmas by Jodie McLeod, which takes twelve of Australia’s most fabulous birds such as cockatoos, fairy wrens and rainbow lorikeets and shows them preparing for Christmas. They’re creating a community and family celebration as each bird brings something to the party, waiting to see who else is coming and what they are contributing.

Jodie’s delightful story and rhyming brings the birds, the Australian bush and how they celebrate Christmas to life. They’re all working together to get to the Christmas feast, all the way from the gang-gang cockatoo to the guardian finches, the fairy wrens and so many other birds including the rainbow cockatoo. It’s delightful and a wonderful take on how everyone celebrates Christmas. Everyone has their own way of celebrating Christmas, and I loved seeing how the birds did it.

An Australian Christmas is unique. Like everyone else in the Southern Hemisphere who celebrates Christmas, we celebrate in the middle of summer. We might go to the beach or have a barbecue. But we watch winter Christmas movies. We have traditional lunches, and snowy decorations because those are the images we have grown up with. We watch all the wintry movies like Home Alone, all the Santa movies, and Love Actually. And let’s face it – these are fun and beloved traditions. It’s lovely though to have books like The 12 Birds of Christmas that can give our Christmas celebrations a touch of Australiana. A touch of what our Christmas is like amidst everything else we love about it is lovely, because it shows that we can have both.

I loved this book, and I do enjoy books that feature Christmas in some way. It’s delightful and a great way to get into the festive season. I think it’ll give a great change to some of the traditional tales, or to be added to a Christmas library.