Four personalized editions of The Night Before Christmas sit on this site, and the question that actually decides between them is not tone or illustration style. It is how many children live in your house.
One child
The $19.99 edition puts your child at the centre of the twinkling, waiting, listening-for-sleigh-bells night. Its own description makes the honest point about what you are buying: a book meant to be read on exactly one evening a year, for many years.
That is worth sitting with before you spend more. A Christmas Eve book gets roughly fifteen readings in its entire working life. It does not need to survive daily handling; it needs to survive fifteen Decembers in a box.
The $39.99 edition does the same job with more production behind it, turning the child into the star of the classic. If this is intended as the family's Christmas Eve book for the next decade and a half, the difference is defensible. If it is one gift among many, it is not.
A first Christmas
Your First Night Before Christmas narrows the retelling to a baby's very first holiday — the twinkling lights, the cosy scents, the magic in the air — and is explicitly built to become the book the child grows up hearing every Christmas Eve.
The catch is in the title. It says first, and it will still say first on the eleventh reading. Some families like that; it turns the book into a marker of a specific year. Others find it slightly odd once the child is nine. Decide which sort you are before ordering, because this is the one detail that cannot be changed later.
Two children or more
Your Family's Night Before Christmas takes up to five children into the story, which makes it the only one of the four that solves the sibling problem.
That problem is real and it is expensive. Buying the single-child edition for each of three children means three books, three names read out separately, and a Christmas Eve that involves reading the same poem three times. It also means that in five years you own three near-identical books.
One book with all the children in it costs $39.99 once. It is the clear answer for any household with more than one child, and it is the answer even if the second child has not arrived yet but is expected — though bear in mind you cannot add a name to it later.
A caution about that last point
Because the names are printed, a family book is a snapshot of the family at the moment you ordered it. If you are reasonably confident the household is complete, it is the best value on this page. If another baby is likely within a few years, you will either be buying it again or reading a book that quietly omits somebody, which is worse.
Quick answer
One child, and this is the Christmas Eve book for the long run: the $39.99 single edition. One child, and it is a nice gift among several: the $19.99 one. An infant, and you want the year marked: Your First Night Before Christmas. Two to five children: the family edition, without hesitation.
Ordering
All four come in hardcover and softcover, chosen on the product page. This is the category where hardcover earns its money for an unusual reason: the book spends its life in storage between readings, and softcover covers curl in a loft or a garage over a decade.
Books are printed to order in the United States with a two to four business day production window before shipping. Nothing is held in stock, and December is the month when that matters, so order early rather than paying for speed later.
Read every name back before you pay — all of them, on the family edition. They appear in your cart, at checkout and on your order confirmation. Personalized books cannot be returned once printed, though a mistake reported quickly can usually be caught pre-print, and anything damaged or misprinted we replace free.
The rest of the seasonal shelf is in Christmas & Holiday Stories. If the occasion is specifically a baby's first Christmas, see three baby's first Christmas books compared; for the books aimed at the parents themselves, see which first Christmas as Mom or Dad book.