BookPage staff

What marks the start of the holiday season for you?
Drawing the MUTTS holiday comic strips. In doing a daily comic I need to be between five and eight weeks ahead of the publication date, so I start playing holiday music and thinking about the holidays as early as October. I love the holiday season and always look forward to it.

Does your family have one very special holiday tradition?
Each person in my wife's extended family, about 30 people, picks a name on Thanksgiving and becomes that person's Secret Santa. We buy a holiday gift for that one person (of course, we all buy gifts for the children). On Christmas Eve we exchange these gifts. We sit in a huge circle and the presents are opened one at a time. It takes all night, but it's a lot fun.

What are you most looking forward to during the holiday season?
A dusting of snow and the quiet, peaceful quality it brings to the morning walk that I take with my dog, Amelie.

What’s your favorite holiday book or song?
My favorite holiday song is Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride"; my favorite holiday CD is Vince Guaraldi's "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol tops my list as for holiday reading.

What books are you planning to give to friends and family?
Since I'm an author, my family expects (and I delight in giving them) my latest books. This year they are: my new children’s book, Wag!, a gift edition of The Gift of Nothing and my collaboration with Eckhart Tolle—Guardians of Being.

What was the best book you read this year?
I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta (I read this book often) and Sunnyside by Glen David Gold.

What’s your number one resolution for 2010?
To do more to help animals and the planet.

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BookPage Meet the Illustrator feature with Patrick McDonnell

What marks the start of the holiday season for you?
Since we celebrate both Hanukah and Christmas in our home, the beginning of the holiday season can sometimes start with the lighting of a candle, or a trip to the local Christmas tree lot. My daughters, when still young, would always pick out the largest tree we could tie to the car roof.

Does your family have one very special holiday tradition?
We like to put antlers on our mini Schnauzer.

What are you most looking forward to during the holiday season?
My eldest daughter is going far away to college this fall as a freshman. I look forward to her return during the holidays.

What’s your favorite holiday book or song?
Nat King Cole’s rendition of “The Christmas Song.”

Why do books make the best gifts?
Because it is possible to find a book to suit just about everyone on your gift list. Because the inscription one can place within a book will connect the recipient to the gift giver each time the gift is opened. Because toys break but good stories are remembered forever, and because books are really easy to wrap.

What was the best book you read this year?
I read contemporary fiction, and I’m especially fond of short stories, as they make for ideal bedtime reading—one or two and it's lights out. However, I encounter around the house the paperback modern classics my children are assigned to read in school. It is very tempting to revisit these titles, which, in the last year, included works by Nabokov, Fitzgerald and Salinger. I guess I’d have to say The Catcher in the Rye was my most satisfying recent this read.

What’s your number one resolution for 2010?
To spend less time reading newspapers and consequently feeling the world is coming to an end, and more time reading books that provide momentary sanctuary in a reality that is not my own.

Comedian and TV host Jeff Foxworthy moves into the realm of children's books with Hide!!!, a picture book that reminds children of the fun to be had playing outside with only their imaginations. In our Q&A, he shares why getting off the couch is important, how his daughters inspire him and whether he really is smarter than a fifth grader.

Why did you decide to write children's books?
I had always had the idea in the back of my mind that I could write a children's book. When I started hosting "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader" suddenly every kid knew who I was. My daughters said, "Dad, if you are ever going to write a children's book now is the time." I thought, "Oh this will be easy." Then you realize you are working with a restricted vocabulary. It has to rhyme, be funny and make sense. And there is an almost musical rhythm to it. After about three days I thought, "No wonder Dr. Seuss is such a big deal! This is hard!"

Hide!!! encourages kids to turn off the TV and be active with friends. Do you think kids are more likely to be couch potatoes now than when you were a kid? How can we fix this?
We really didn't have the option of being couch potatoes when I was growing up. There were only three television channels and the only kid's programming was on Saturday morning. We always played outside until we could hear Mom calling us (not by cell phone but with her hands cupped around her mouth) that it was dinner time.

I recently read an article that said that children that play outside develop better problem solving skills and have a stronger ability to work within a group. But my generation, as parents, has been so overprotective that we have taken away many of those opportunities. I'm not sure how you fix it. Sometimes I think we probably stagnate our children's emotional growth by not letting them have some separation from us.

What was your favorite book when you were a kid?
I was always a big fan of Dr. Seuss. He didn't write for adults, he wrote for kids. If he had to make up a word to make a sentence rhyme, so be it. To this day you can't find many adults that can't quote at least a few lines ofGreen Eggs and Ham. They were books you read over and over again and they still hold up decades later.

Which five authors would you like to have dinner with?
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Jamie Leigh Curtis.

Fill in the blank: "You might be a redneck kid if….."
"All of your kisses taste like peanut butter."

Fess up: are you smarter than a fifth grader?
I've said that if they didn't give me the answers that would be the shortest show on TV. We often have celebrities come on the show and play for charity. The fifth graders were trying to talk me into doing it. I told them, "It's better if everybody just thinks Mr. Jeff is an idiot than to take the test and prove them right!"