You would think by now that’s there not a lot of imaginative newness that can be brought to bear on the story of Santa; after all, his story is well documented, to the point of exhaustive detail, and you could rightly assume that’s all the festive mythmakers wrote.
But, as Tinsel: The Girl Who Invented Christmas by Sibéal Pounder demonstates with garrulously sweet enthusiasm and a joyful certainty that good and rightness will always prevail through sheer exuberance and commitment to what is good and right and selfless, there’s a lot left to tell about the giftgiver who spends Christmas Eve beating the sun in a bid to ensure every boy and girl has a toy to call their very own on Christmas morning.
Take for example the fact that Santa, at least the one on the giftgiving seat is not a man at all.
In this vibrantly different take on well-established Christmas tropes and cliches, Santa actually begins as the inspired idea of two homeless girls, Rinki and Blanche Claus, in Victorian London who, after magically meeting one Christmas Eve after Blanche has been given a mysterious red bauble which allows her to see the North Pole by an old woman, and enjoying a fruit mince picnic on the corner where Christmas trees are sold, decide that the world needs to see what girls can do to transform the festive season.
After all, men haven’t exactly coated the holiday in glory, save for one Charles Dickens and perhaps Prince Albert who brings many German Christmas traditions to a lacklustre Britain that barely marks the season at the time, with inequality rife, society caught in a dog-eat-dog hamster wheel of competitiion to survive, and no one really in the festive spirit.
Blanche stared at the girl who had answered her plea, unable to believe her eyes. She was older now, and just like Blanche she had moved the little gold thread to her pinky finger.
‘Rinki?’ Blanche managed to whisper as the girl leaped barefoot into the snow and hugged her tightly.
‘IT’S YOU! IT’S BLANCHE CLAUS!’
Both of these determined girls are convinced that they can change the face of Christmas and while the odds look stacked against them with neither in a position to do much of anything beyond surviving, events conspire in the best of all possible ways to place them where they can bring their dazzling dream to life-changing reality.
Told with the joyfully giddy, playfully alive, sing-songy tone that these kinds of tales all but demand, Tinsel: The Girl Who Invented Christmas takes all the parts of the Santa story we thought we knew and gives a bright, shiny, and refeshingly wonderful feminist glow.
It asks the question repeatedly – “What is somewhere along the way we’ve all got the Santa story a bit wrong …?” – and then proceeds to show us twisted and out-of-shape Santa’s origins have become, starting with the fact that it’s not Santa Claus at all that’s the driver of this festive renaissance of selfless giving.
Rather, Blanche is the one who ends up in the prime sleigh seat, driven by a marked changed in circumstances and an abundance of new Elven friends to forge a new Christmas tradition where the poor have as much right to festive joy as the next person.
Up until that point, Christmas has been the preserve of men and the rich, like Rinki’s new neighbour, Mr Krampus who is a vile upholder of the established order with a driving, vengeful need to stop Blanche and Rinki in their transformative tracks, excluding people like Blanche and Rinki who have to struggle to gather up Christmas crumbs from a society that doesn’t care for anyone who can’t extravagently pay their way.
So, Tinsel: The Girl Who Invented Christmas is about how that all changes, and how wondrously different things are when two girls-turned-young-women upend everything, conjuring all kinds of inclusively wrm and giving new traditions, all influenced by the idea that everyone deserves to love and celebrate.
Along their way to a whole new Christmas, they give us Santa (again, really Blanche, the change due to the fact that the “M” drops off “S” during a postcard send to all the kids of the world, and the fact that there is a “Santa” who is most assuredly, and happily, in a supporting role), nine reindeer (including Rudolph who’s red nose is quite different to what you expect and who is a girl reindeer, thank you), gifts, elves making toys and inventing things, and a whole host of other new festive traditions.
It would be a massive spoiler alert to explain what they are and how Pounder gives them gorgeously new origins that reflect a pattern of thinking that is female-oriented and far more selfless than the male-centric one it attempts to displace – though there is a world weariness that suggests they will have to fight to beat a misogynistic system that always attempts to wipe women and their advances from the record – but she does it beautifully, humourously and with such a tinsely spark of joy and hope that you spend much of the novel smiling like a kid on Christmas morning.
It was Christmas Eve and Blanche was soaring over London.
The skies were clear and icy-cold and the streets were decorated with yesterday’s snow.
Blanche had got faster, and slicker. She leaned over the edge of the sleigh as they flew over Green Park and spotted Rinki, as arranged, staring up at her favourite status. She pulled on the left rein and looped back to land.
While Tinsel: The Girl Who Invented Christmas is ostensibly a kids’ book, anyone who needs to feel a festie shot in the arm should read this luminously optimistic book.
It brims full of the idea that while men keep trying to take over everything and robbing women of their rightful credit for a host of wonderful advances – just a note here that it’s not aggressively message heavy or gleefully polemic; it makes it’s point with charm and garrulous hopefulness, a potent brew that communicates what it wants to say with real perspective-shifting joy – that the effect of their selfless actions remain powerfully intact.
While popular culture man-washes much of the Christmas story, the fact remains in this endless delightful tale that it is two young women who change the festive world, who give us a whole new festive tradition that revolutionises how Christmas is celebrated and that refocus the festival back onto selflessness and giving and joy.
It’s hard not to get swept into a world where all Elves are called Carol, where a giant Christmas tree called Eggnog loves Christmas so much he accidentally tramples gingerbread houses underfoot in his enthusiasm and where baubles are magical portals to a new world as well as a comms device, and where Santa is not Santa at all but Blanche who trains like an SAS professional, after dreaming big with her friend Rinki, remarks the festive world in a wholly different and brilliantly, imaginatively original image.
Tinsel: The Girl Who Invented Christmas is an unparalleled joy that has a baddy who tries to stop this all-new Christmas in its tracks and who fails because when you’re up against this much girl power, this much commitment to bringing everyone into the Christmas world and making their lives better, even if it’s just once a year, you will lose because all that love and joy and hope can be stopped not then, not now, and you suspect with this kind of festive magic at their disposal, well into a tinsel-saturated future.