 When Dav created Dragon, he knew that he wanted to do several books with this character. So he began to think of different situations that he could put Dragon into. Christmas was an obvious choice, because it is such a well-loved holiday---especially for kids. But there was a problem:
| "The first few Dragon books were kind of hard to write, because Dragon lived alone and had nobody to interact with. But the Christmas book was especially difficult to write. I thought, 'who wants to read a Christmas book about someone who lives alone and has no friends?'
So I thought about the things I loved best about Christmas when I was a kid. Believe it or not, the best Christmas memories that I have are of getting ready for Christmas. Baking cookies, decorating the tree, putting up the lights, making candy wreaths... the preparation for Christmas was always more fun than Christmas itself! So I decided to make most of the book about that stuff." — Dav Pilkey |
When Christmas finally came in the last chapter, Dav really had trouble writing about it. He wanted the last chapter to be fun and cheerful. But the story came out much different than expected.
| "This book ended up not being the merry, joyous book that I started out to write. It ended up being kind of quiet and sweet. I decided not to change the title, however, because 'Dragon's Merry Christmas' sounds much better than 'Dragon's Kind of Quiet and Sweet Christmas'." — Dav Pilkey |
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