Kiwi Christmas Books: 'Do you still want books, I asked them? Are they having much of an impact?’

Kiwi Christmas Books has opened donations for 2024. This time last year, founder Sonya Wilson wrote for Kete about the generosity she sees year after year, and the difference brand new books can make for families in need.

November. I get nervous at this time of year. Little flocks of ‘what ifs’ start to flutter around in my stomach and the internal voice, always far less sure that its external counterpart, whispers, pssst it won’t work this time. You/it/they won’t be enough.

I run the children’s book-gifting charity Kiwi Christmas Books and every year, around this time, I ask New Zealanders to go out and buy books for me. I’ve been doing this for four years now, and every year I’m anxious about how that ask will play out. Because every year I also promise ~35 different charities around New Zealand that I will deliver them enough books to supply the families they care for with Christmas presents for their kids.

The entire scheme relies on many people around New Zealand being very generous. It relies on thousands of people buying into the premise that books are a hugely important tool in a child’s development, that good books grow great kids, that it’s not fair that while some kids grow up in households full of books, many do not have a single one.

We open donations on the 1st of November, and my anxiety hits on the 2nd. Will people come to the party like they did last year and the year before? Will we hit the numbers I promised we would in all those interminable funding applications that I wrote? And do the kids even care anymore? Do their attached adults? There’s so many distractions, so much going on. And people are broke. It’s tough out there; three of the bookshops that collected books for me last year have since shut down, two others have gone online-only. The mayors of our major cities are proposing budget cuts to libraries. Do people even care about books anymore?

People care. I re-learn this every year. Because every year they deliver. Already donated so far this year: beautiful large-format hard cover books like Rivers from Gecko Press, Mat Tait’s award-winning Te Wehenga, and YA wonders like Anne Kayes’ In Our Own Backyard.

Even a copy of my own favourite childhood book, Margaret Mahy’s The Lion in the Meadow, translated into te reo Māori has arrived:

I kī atu te tamaiti, "E whae, he raiona kei roto i ngā otaota"

Ka kī te whaea, “Horihori, e tama.”

(The little boy said, “Mother, there’s a lion in the meadow.”

The mother said, “Nonsense, little boy.”)

New Zealanders know how important reading is. Reading for pleasure, indulging in the fantastic and the unreal and the supernatural and the completely made-up — it teaches you stuff about the world. It teaches language and literacy and supports academic intelligence, yes, but it enhances emotional intelligence, too, often a far more elusive goal. I’m not the first person to say this, but I’m happy to repeat it ad nauseam: a child who reads becomes an adult who thinks.

I surveyed the charities we gift our books to earlier this year.

The respondents are not people involved in the business of books, they are not literacy experts, they just work with struggling families day in, day out, but believe me, they know it, too.

Do you still want books, I asked them? Are they having much of an impact?

“These books have an immensely positive impact in our community, especially over Christmas.” one of them replied. “We are here to relieve stress, and Christmas can be particularly stressful for families who cannot afford to eat, let alone buy presents for their children. And books are *so* important to healthy child development,”

Another told us that many of the families they work with have never had a new book, that the children really treasure them. “Children get really excited. Some of the children have carried them around for days and won't let others touch them!”

And another: “Most of our clients are speechless! There are often tears, and lots of gratitude. For some children, it will be the first book they have owned.”

Sometimes, it’s easy to despair. When you see kids constantly attached to screens, when your own kid’s addiction to Roblox is gathering steam, when you see comments from the likes of the Mayor of Christchurch, Phil Mauger, describe a library as just “a building with some books in it,” or headlines from Auckland such as “Brown’s brutal budget cuts will impact hardest on the reading and writing levels of our most vulnerable” in the Herald, and when you see another bookstore shutting up shop.

But this year I’ve had several new bookstores join up to Kiwi Christmas Books. I’ve had several companies want to collect books for me, I’ve even had an All Black, the wonderful Ardie Savea, and his backers at One NZ, tell me that they’ll donate the profits of their picture book to us.

Sport and Commerce want to support literature too; the top rugby player in the world and one of NZ’s biggest telecommunications companies also believe in the power and value of books.

Ka pai. It’s all good, I tell myself. The books will continue to come.

Please donate here: www.kiwichristmasbooks.org.nz

About Sonya Wilson

Sonya Wilson is the author of Spark Hunter winner of the Junior Fiction and Best First Book at the 2022 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. She founded Kiwi Christmas Books in 2019.