Perhaps the surest way to blast the winter blues is to be reminded of the simple pleasures that a snowy day can provide. In Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day a boy wakes up to an exciting event: the first snow of winter. With uninhibited joy, he goes outside to explore the silent, snow-covered city. He makes footprints in a clean path, knocks snow from a tree’s branches, and builds a snowman and an angel. Keats won the Caldecott Medal in 1963 for the book’s striking cut-out illustrations. “The Snowy Day” also broke ground for featuring one of the first African-American protagonists in a picture book.
