I have to confess that I have a little trouble with the whole concept of Christmas reading. Not, I hasten to add, because I have anything against Christmas, or – now you mention it – motherhood and apple pie. Nor am I proposing the festive season should be accompanied by an unrelenting diet of Haute culture. No, it's just that I tend to celebrate Christmas with eating, responsible drinking and, erm, moaning about the Queen's speech as an embarrassing vestige of our feudal past. I've never really done Christmas reading as such – just, well, reading.

Next door did, when I was a child, with mince pies and crisps and everybody gathered round for A Visit from St Nicholas. But despite the crisps, I have to confess that Clement Clarke Moore lost me somewhere around the "Twas". A family tradition wasn't born.

But Christmas isn't about grown-ups, is it? We're just doing it for the kids. So with a quick hat-tip to Father Christmas's cameo in Stick Man (as a … wait for it … stuck man … chimney … geddit?), I'd like to propose Babar and Father Christmas.

You'll have guessed already that it features the big man himself, though surely that's the absolute bare minimum for any book that can truly call itself Christmas reading. Jean de Brunhoff's daffy plot is set in motion when the elephant children write to Father Christmas and receive no reply. Thinking that he couldn't possibly refuse a direct request, Babar sets off in search of the unwilling correspondent, eventually tracking him down to a gnomish batcave controversially located near the town of PRJMNESTWE in Bohemia. After a brief summer sequence back in the land of the elephants – complete with an overheated Santa riding on a zebra – the story ends with Babar's recruitment into the toy distribution network, thanks to a magic costume and sack.

This rosy-cheeked, sun-hatted form is just one of a number of delightful illustrations, including Babar browsing among the bouquinistes beside the Seine, Babar struggling through a violent snow storm, and a cutaway of Santa's secret hideout, showing "the doll room, the soldier room, the train room … dwarfs' dormitories, the lifts and the machine-rooms". The text is more delightful still, poised between 1940s aristocratic formality and ungainly translationese, as when Babar checks in to a "quiet little hotel" to freshen up, a development greeted by the narrator with the aperçu, "One always feels better after a good wash". Or when Babar's dog, "bombarded … with hard snowballs" by Santa's little helpers, returns to tell his master of his adventure and the elephant declares himself "very curious to make the acquaintance of these gnomes". Or even when Father Christmas laments having "the greatest difficulty last year in arranging an even distribution of toys to all the children in the world".

But it's the batty details that make this such a charming read. The dog is called "Duck". Babar blows "quietly" through his trunk to beat back the gnomes who are trying to keep him away from Father Christmas's cavern, and "immediately they … [fall] … on top of each other". The "celebrated Professor William Jones" discovers directions to Father Christmas's house in a rare book Babar has unearthed, "uttering little grunts" as he peruses the text. In fact, it's so odd, so lovely, and so damn Christmassy that I think I can feel a family tradition coming on. All I need to do is find some mince pies and some crisps ...