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:

Christmas Poems by U. A. Fanthorpe

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.

The Oxford Bookof Christmas Poems edited by Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark

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 by Terry Pratchett

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.

Star of Night by Katherine Paterson

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.