MRS. CLAUS AND THE TROUBLE WITH TURKEYS

Holidays are a special challenge when you’re married to Santa.

April Claus had to put up with a lot when she agreed to marry Nick, the current incumbent in a long line of Santa Clauses. Winters at the North Pole are brutal, and the wrangling among the elves, snowmen, and reindeer can get on anyone’s nerves. So when elves Jingles and Butterbean suggest bringing a Thanksgiving festival to Santaland, April looks forward to a little touch of home. Of course, she encounters one challenge after another getting Santalanders with the program. For Sparkletoe’s Thanksgiving Parade to march down Festival Boulevard in Christmastown, there has to be a marching band, but the only Thanksgiving song she can think to teach its members is “Over the River and Through the Woods,” which they play on repeat but not always on key. The reindeer quarrel over who’ll get to pull Santa’s sleigh, with patricians Comet and Dasher locking horns with humbler deer, like April’s sister-in-law Lucia’s pet Quasar. The local grocery can’t get enough frozen turkeys, creating long waiting lists on which April, never the most organized of housekeepers, finds herself at the very end. And to top it off, Gobbles, who was supposed be the main course at the festive meal at Castle Kringle, has now vanished. But these holiday hassles fade into the background when Nick’s cousin, Elspeth Claus, is poisoned at a family dinner and April’s deviled eggs seem to be to blame. Constable Crinkles is reluctant to arrest Mrs. Claus, and to be fair, there’s no place to put her, since the constabulary is filled to the brim with papier-mâché doughnut holes destined for the police department’s parade float. But if April doesn’t find the real culprit soon, she fears she will never be able to play bass drum in the Santaland orchestra again.

A bonanza for whimsy fans everywhere.