(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
In this postmodern, mash-up obsessed, creatively synergistic digital age of ours, it’s fun to see what really imaginative people will do when they mix their own highly original ideas with an existing, much-loved story.
Case in point is The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland by Carys Bexington (writer) and Kate Hindley (illustrator), now an animated special on Hulu (see below) which takes Lewis Carroll’s madcap classic and gives it a good sir in with a little Clement Moore and a whole lot of very cute and enormously enjoyable storytelling by a very talented duo.
The result is an exuberantly colourful and emotionally thoughtful tale which acknowledges the magic of the season in a big way, with Santa the compassionately caring beating heart of a season which wants everyone to be included in the wonder and joy of Christmas, even the Queen of Hearts whom we know from 1865’s Alice in Wonderland is more apt to order the lopping off of people’s heads than make snowmen or give a healthily-sized Christmas pudding to a scarf-wearing flamingo.
She’s mean, she’s nasty and all she wants to do is hurt people with furious intent.
But what if there was a very good reason she was like this? What if, one day, years and years ago, a very small Princess, full of hope and vigour, wrote to Santa with the most wondrous of wishes but the letter got lost and only arrived years later when her expectantly soft heart had hardened into calcified meanness?
Could that be undone? Could an act of kindness bring her back into the festive fold?
The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland argues, quite beautifully and in rhyming poetry no less, that anything is possible at Christmas and that cold and disappointed hearts can spring back to life.
Quite how that happens must be left to the reading, and now, of course, watching of The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland, but suffice to say, Bexington, with couplets so rhythmically playful and pretty they practically sing as you read them, and Hindley, whose artwork is joyously adorable and infinitely, cutely expressive, make it all happen and this tale of redemption and healing at Christmas will make you come alive with the vivaciously hopeful possibilities of the season.
It will also enthrall you with its boisterous imaginative soul, which brings Santa and Wonderland alive in gorgeously enrapturing ways, where reindeers bump Queens out of windows for their thundering rudeness and elves surround a sleigh to get it ready for the strangest and most unusual of all flights.
The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland is a thing of wonder and imagination, joy and fun, and it will treat your eyes, enliven your soul, make you laugh and make you sigh as a character who we expect will be forever terrible with no hope of redemption comes alive and discovers the child within, once again confirming that Christmas is the most wonderful, magical, loveliest and twinkling festive time of the year!