Christmas Books
Shop
signs declare: ‘All your festive favourites here!’ Adverts claim: ‘Christmas – [supermarket
sponsoring this advert] makes it.’ To
me, this seems unlikely, unless the shop contains not only a midnight Communion
service, but also sufficient faith in God to keep me sure that Christmas is
good news. Or, if they can’t do anything
about my spiritual state, will they at least host a Carnival Band carol concert
with Maddy Prior singing ‘Dancing Day’?
(Nope – she’s touring with Steeleye Span this winter.)
Apart
from religious celebrations and giving to good causes, most of us have things
that make us feel festive at Christmas, and these usually have less to do with buying
lots of new stuff than listening to (or performing) our favourite Christmas
music, re-watching favourite films, and re-reading favourite books. Some of my well-loved books are:
This
collection of the short poems which Fanthorpe wrote for her home-made Christmas
cards demonstrates how much a good poet can say in a few lines. Honed to perfection, they manage to combine
being pithy, accessible, thought-provoking, original, and poignant. Many of them imagine Christmas from the
viewpoint of every possible character, including angels dismayed by the human
messiness of childbirth, foxes offering Jesus a safe den out of the way of the
hunters, and the sheepdog left in charge while the shepherds visited Bethlehem
– or, at a more secular level, Father Christmas’s reindeer grumbling that each
year the presents get heavier, children more numerous, and bedtimes later.
One
of my favourites, ‘BC:AD’, reflects on the unremarked, seemingly boring moment
‘when Before/ Turned into After…’
And this was the
moment
When a few farm
workers and three
Members of an
obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard
by starlight straight
Into the kingdom
of heaven.
Beautiful
anthology of poems, ranging from traditional ballads like the Cherry Tree Carol
through to the twentieth-century poetry of Charles Causley and Ted Hughes. It’s a good balance of famous pieces like T.
S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ and less well-known gems like Miroslav Holub’s
explanation of how to paint a perfect Christmas. The book is divided into thematic sections:
the onset of winter; the story of the Nativity (not glossing over the horrors
of the Massacre of the Innocents); the way we, and our ancestors, celebrate
Christmas; and, finally, the New Year, and the coming of spring.
The
illustrations by a wide assortment of artists with very different styles
reflect the different moods of the poems, and sometimes link them. For example,
the background illustration on the first double-page spread neatly bridges
Theodore Roethke’s depiction of rural winter and Gareth Owen’s pithier
evocation of winter in the town.
The
Hogfather (the Discworld equivalent of Father Christmas) has been kidnapped,
and someone is mind-controlling the children of the Disc to stop them believing
in him. So another anthropomorphic
personification – Death – has to take over his job in order to keep faith in
the Hogfather alive, while Death’s granddaughter Susan goes to find and rescue
the real Hogfather. For the Hogfather is
not just a kindly old gift-giver, but an ancient and important god, and if he
dies, the sun will never rise again.
Death
quite enjoys trying a job where he can actually give people things and where they want to see him, but he is indignant at the gulf between rich and
poor – he is, after all, the great leveller – and sets about righting
wrongs. This Hogswatchnight, the Little
Match Girl gets warmth and shelter and the chance to survive, and smug kings
get a telling-off; tramps get a gourmet meal and the diners in the posh
restaurants are eating old boots.
So,
while this is obviously a book of the secular, the pagan, and the possibly-invented-by-folklorists
side of Christmas, it is also the place where the Lord of Misrule meets Mary’s
hymn to the saviour who will fill the hungry with good things and send the rich
away empty. And if this is Magnificat,
the Hogfather’s ultimate fate is pure magnificence. Like most of Pratchett’s work, this novel is
an exuberant mixture of the intentionally ridiculous – the God of Wine’s
counterpart is the Oh God of Hangovers; a computer running the ELIZA program is
driven mad by its patient and has to have medicine typed into it for the rest
of the night – and the sublime.
This
is out of print, but it’s worth looking for second-hand copies online. I first read this collection of
Christmas-themed short stories at primary school, but I wouldn’t call it a
children’s book exactly. The stories cover
fairly dark territory: a father searching for his runaway son realises how much
he needs the boy’s forgiveness; a mother wearily goes through Christmas
shopping with her little boy while grieving for her dead daughter; a little
girl is terrified that she may have killed her baby brother. Nevertheless, there is always the light of
hope and grace shining through the dark, and the darkness has not overcome it.
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