George Washington’s Birthday – A Mostly True Tale

Margaret McNamara's George Washington's Birthday is a short, funny picture book for 5 year olds about a boy having an absolutely rotten birthday.

What happens

George goes to sleep six and wakes up seven. Happy birthday to me, he thinks.

Then he goes downstairs, and nobody says anything.

His mother tells him to eat his porridge and mind the baby. His half brother marks his sums all wrong and tells him he'll never amount to anything. Down by the river a passing young man is impressed by how far he can throw a stone, then ruins it by saying that's pretty good for a six-year-old.

And when he gets home cold and grumpy and hoping for tea by the fire, his father puts a hatchet in his hand and sets him to pruning the cherry trees.

You can see where this is going. So can your reader, probably, if they've heard the story. What makes it funny is that the famous line comes out of a thoroughly fed-up seven year old who has had quite enough of this particular Saturday.

Father, I cannot tell a lie. It was I who chopped down the tree.

There's a lovely detail here. He always used his best grammar when he was in trouble.

The birthday ends better than it starts, and that bit is quietly sweet rather than a big finish.

Then the book turns around and does something rather clever. George himself steps forward and separates what was true from what wasn't. The brothers were real. The river was real. The list of 110 rules he wrote and carried about was real, and so were his horses' names.

The stone across the river was a legend, and the river is two hundred feet wide. The wig was a myth as well. As for the cherry tree, a preacher called Parson Weems made that up in 1800 for a book, to show how good and truthful George was.

A story about telling the truth that isn't true. Your reader will enjoy that, and so will you.

It's genuinely short. One sitting, easily, and it works read aloud.

One thing to sort out first if you're in Britain. This is about the first president of the United States, and it ends on Presidents' Day, which your reader will not have heard of. Half a sentence of context before you start and it'll all land.

What to read next

If you want another from the same writer where a story everyone knows gets turned inside out, The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot is in the library too. Three young aliens leave home to find their own planets, and one of them builds a house that will not fall down.