Sally Veillette

Celebrates the Season with a Christmas Classic

by Raven Howell

‘Twas the night before Christmas,

When all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring,

Not even a mouse….

Publisher Sally Veillette never intended to end up overseeing a team of 80 contributors from every corner of the globe to recreate a cherished Christmas Classic into 20 bilingual, award-winning editions to welcome a new generation of young readers. Now, just a few years after the inception of Pop the Cork Publishing, this former electrical engineer and current American expat is headed into her second holiday season at the helm of this multilingual and multinational publishing project. What started as a homemade gift of Clement Clarke Moore’s beloved ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, translated in Italian for her then toddler daughter, has expanded in ways Sally never thought possible. 

Originally from upstate New York, Sally grew up near the city of Troy, where Clement Clarke Moore’s poem was first published. ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas has played a key role in our American holiday lore ever since. Christmases around the globe celebrate with Santa Claus, his reindeer-drawn sleigh, and their magical flight, but few people realize that it was Clement Clarke Moore who penned these seemingly timeless icons for the first time in 1823.

On the heels of a successful career in microelectronics and tech advertising, Sally relocated to her mother’s ancestral home on the island of Sicily. “The Mediterranean always enhances my life force and creativity,” she says. She began work on a book about seeking inspiration: Coming to Your Senses: Soaring with Your Soul. Her daughter Chiara was born shortly after. As Chiara grew older, Sally found the time to pick up where she’d left off.

What began with a request to create an English-Spanish bilingual edition of the Christmas book in 2020 resulted in the birth of today’s Christmas200 project. “Although the story has been translated into various languages before, no single publishing company has produced a full multilingual line of such breadth,” Sally tells me. “I wanted to do my small part to help unite the world.”

Coming out of Covid in 2021, Sally felt a driving need to do even more to help bring Christmas magic back to life. Kids’ lives had been turned upside down. Everyone’s had. Children didn’t seem as carefree as they once had been. The impact of living with active shooter drills and intensifying natural disasters ripples down to our kids. Not just American kids, but children from everywhere.

“Finding volunteers to assist with expanding the project was easy. They felt called to spread the joy, too,” Sally adds.

The logistical challenges encountered in bringing her vision to life were intense at times. “This series isn’t a traditional one; it always asks us to stretch!” Sally exclaims. “Luckily, there isn’t a board of directors or vice president of this or that who needs to give us a green light. It’s always been led by my love of Christmas magic. The guiding light of Clement’s poem is joyful anticipation. Our kids today too often live with daily anxieties. I want to give them a glimpse of wonderful things that they can count on.”

“Magic and anxiety can live side by side,” Sally continues. “Our foundations can be rocked, education compromised by a pandemic, and dreams challenged. But help is always there. Help and hope.”

Separating the project into manageable tasks was key to its success. Recordings were done in Sally’s Italian villa, in a hotel suite in Dubai (no kidding!), in a theatre in Sicily, and in various recording studios in Rhode Island, Chicago, Sri Lanka, Kerala, Nazareth, and Rome. An engineer in North Carolina produced the final cuts of the recordings for consistency.

“Our programming and animation team spans Albania, America, and Italy. I met the user interface designer for our website on a plane ride from Boston to Rome. We found a book marketing consultant from New Jersey!” Sally recruited graphic artists from Italy, Germany, Albania, Sri Lanka, and America to collaborate to produce the multilingual collection. These designers typeset 20 books in 20 languages, occasionally in languages requiring fonts unknown to the team. We resorted to proofing some languages character by character (Malayalam and Sinhala, for example). Several Sicilian teenagers worked with Italian cartoonist Marco Nifosì to add a loveable new mouse character to the book’s cherished cast. Eventually, the series began to take shape.

“Of course, none of this would have been possible without my elves, Natasja and Lucile, whom I met while they were wintering in our local marina, living aboard their sailboats,” Sally mentions, much to my delight. “They have been instrumental in coordinating the project’s many moving pieces across disparate teams and time zones.”

The team would have preferred to sit side-by-side around a real table, but today’s technology allowed everyone to stay connected. “There have been thousands of special moments in producing this book series. I am filled with such gratitude that so many people showed up, at just the right times, to bring my crazy dream to life,” shares Sally. “That magic would be Santa’s doing, by the way.”

Christmas books give people a reason to pull their children into their laps and shower them with attention, love, and traditional stories. The bilingual ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas series offers something more: a way to honor their roots and introduce conversations about other cultures, too.

“Our goal is to promote understanding, compassion, and harmony,” Sally adds. “I picture grandparents reading to their grandkids in their native tongues, with the grandkids reading the English stanzas aloud. I picture schools inviting elders to share their traditions with the children. Even upper-grade language classes might find the translations valuable and entertaining.”

When asked about taking on the role of lifting spirits in troubled times, Sally credits her ability to harness her creative energy. “It isn’t a question of staying motivated, rather it’s a question of how to negotiate the inevitable twists and turns,” she explains. “I view each new challenge like a puzzle. When I hit a wall, it’s frustrating, of course. But when I look around, breathe, another choice eventually appears. Italians have an expression for this: ‘Saper aspettare,’ the art of knowing how to wait.”

In the final stretch of the publication process, Sally recalls how she fell in love with what she views as the most poetic stanza in ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, and the way it moved one of her volunteers.

As dry leaves that before

the wild hurricane fly,

when they meet with an obstacle,

mount to the sky.

“Most volunteers didn’t pay particular attention to that stanza, except one. As she recited these lines, she teared up, moved by how her life was reflected in its words. The stanza suggests that obstacles are conquered, naturally, as if by design. If a hurricane is coming, just look up. Help is always present.”

As is Christmas magic.

Today, Santa’s story is available in 20 languages including Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, Hindi, and German, in paperback, ebook, and narrated enhanced ebook editions. Designed to share holiday joy and help with early childhood literacy and language learning, each edition features two stanzas on each page—one in English, the other in a second language. The enhanced ebooks, available through Apple Books and Google Play, offer a holiday soundtrack, text that highlights along with the audio narration, and playful animation. Children can listen to the story over and over again, and then practice reading themselves!

“I often think of how Clement Clarke Moore created a simple poem to read to his children around their fireplace on Christmas Eve, that then took on a life of its own. It’s remarkable that one man, who lived just 200 years ago, wrote a tale that shaped Christmas around the world,” Sally explained. “What’s even sweeter is that so few people, inside and outside of North America, even realize that it was Moore’s poem that envisioned Santa’s reindeer-drawn sleigh! People assume this image is as timeless as Christmas magic itself.”

“I wouldn’t dare compare myself to him, but it’s not lost on me that my project began with a single translation for my daughter, too,” Sally laughs. “Clearly, the magic that fills Moore’s story is eternal, paving the way for teams like ours to form and rally around heartfelt visions of all kinds. What better affirmation that the love that we share – in big and small ways, in our homes and with our communities – holds unimaginable power. Certainly, Moore’s vision has achieved so much without ever intending to do so. I wonder what he’d think about how his words circle the globe with Santa each year!”

“It’s the smiles we’ve put on the faces of families worldwide that have been an important payoff, as have winning so many awards in Italy, America, and from the Latino community!” Sally adds. To date, the Christmas200 project has been honored with a Nautilus Award, a Moonbeam Award, a Purple Dragonfly Award, an Italian UNPLI award for translations in Italian dialects, is Story Monster Approved, and was honored twice by the 2024 International Latino Book Award for Best Children’s Picture Book in Portuguese and an Honorable Mention for bilingual book publishing. 

And there’s no stopping the Pop the Cork team now! They have plans to celebrate next season with the release of an app, called “Santa’s Story,” that will allow children to access all 20 languages on mobile and tablet devices. Sally and her team remain committed to sharing that Christmas magic with as many children as they can! Watch for new translations, too! Ho ho ho!!!

We hope you’ll join us by sharing one or more of these bilingual editions with your family this season! Follow along with what’s to come at www.instagram.com/christmas200books on Instagram, or www.facebook.com/Christmas200 on Facebook, or at our website www.Christmas200.com. Reach out to Sally Veillette at sally@ciaosally.com with any comments, suggestions, or questions.