“How can an old world be so innocent?” Annie Dillard wondered in her beautiful ode to winter. Carl Sagan believed that the reverence and awe we experience in our encounters with nature bring us the closest we get to divinity. Out of that ancient innocence and that divine reverence writer Jean E. Pendziwol and illustrator Isabelle Arsenault weave a beautiful lullaby in Once Upon a Northern Night (public library | IndieBound) — a loving homage to winter’s soft-coated whimsy, composed with touches of Thoreau’s deep reverence for nature and Whitman’s gift for exalting “the nature around and within us.”

Once upon a northern night
while you lay sleeping,
wrapped in a downy blanket,
I painted you a picture.

It started with one tiny flake,
perfect
and beautiful
and special,
just like you.
Then there were two,
and then three.

Soon
the night sky filled with
sparkling specks of white
crowding
and floating,
tumbling down to the welcoming ground
until the earth was
wrapped in a downy blanket,
just like you.

Arsenault — whose art graces such previous gems as Jane, the Fox & Me, a graphic novel inspired by Charlotte Brönte, and Virginia Wolf, a picture-book reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s childhood with her sister Vanessa, and Migrant, a kind of Alice in Wonderland for the modern immigrant experience — captures in befitting pictures the magical scenes Pendziwol paints with words: Pine trees “held prickly hands to catch the falling flakes”; a mother doe and her fawn “nuzzled the sleeping garden with memories of summer, then wandered off”; a “small, small mouse with big, big ears” scurries across the picnic table “mounded with snowy white like vanilla ice cream.”

Once upon a northern night
a great gray owl gazed down
with his great yellow eyes
on the milky-white bowl of your yard.
Without a sound
not even the quietest whisper,
his great silent wings lifted and
down,
down,
down,
he drifted,
leaving a feathery sketch
of his passing
in the snow.

Once upon a northern night,
deep,
deep
in the darkest hours,
the snowy clouds crept away
and stars appeared —
twinkling points of light
hanging in the purple sky.

I knew by the time you woke,
the sun would have chased them away,
so I set them like diamonds
on the branches of the willow.

Complement the immeasurably whimsical Once Upon a Northern Night with the vintage Scandinavian classic Moominland Midwinter, then revisit the best children’s books of the year.

Illustrations courtesy of Groundwood Books