(courtesy Harper Collins Booksellers Australia)
Giving your inner festive child a reviving taste of what it should be like when Christmas rolled around is never a bad thing.
That’s why this reviewer often reads books aimed at kids because they perfectly capture the joy and exhilaration of being a kid as December counts down, things become ever more Christmassy, and you look forward to Santa coming to visit (sure, we never had a chimney growing up but that never stopped me believing).
A series which has done more than any other to keep my inner child alive and festively kicking is Mel Taylor-Bessent’s The Christmas Carrolls trilogy which centres on a British family who LOVE Christmas and celebrate it every single day of the year.
Many of their neighbours think they’re crackers but they don’t care, happily leaving their home decorated year round, eating and drinking Christmas feasts each and every day and spreading cheer wherever they go!
They may eccentric and idiosyncratic but like the gloriously individualistic The Addams Family, they care not what others think and simply carry out living out the words and intention of Wizzard’s 1973 song, “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday”.
Christmas spirit is everything to this one-of-a-kind family whose adventures in Christmasness revolve around eldest child Holly who thinks nothing of going to school and giving our Christmas cards in September and keeping all her schoolwork in a Santa backpack.
Why would you not do that?
Archer and I sat on the kitchen floor for ages, taking turns to catchy Ivy when her waddling got too wobbly, and taking photos on the christmacam. Mum even turned the volume up on the festadio so we could sing along to some Christmas tunes, and Dad made us some super-shocking snowball sundaes that had popping candy inside the ice-cream and giant snowball gobstoppers hidden at the bottom of the glass. It was the perfect Holiday Eve.
In the third, and at this stage final book in the series, The Christmas Carrolls: The Christmas Club, the Carrolls are doing what many a set of central characters have done in a series before and going on the road.
They’re off to New York to lead the city’s Christmas season parade – think Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade but Christmassy – the prize they won in the second book in the series, The Christmas Carrolls: The Christmas Competition, held by The Christmas Chronicle and which puts them into almost cheer-ending competition with the grimly determined Klaus family.
It’s the closest the family comes to being defeated by the uncaring cruelty of the world which mocks those who don’t slot neatly into the mainstread, but their innate love for each other, for Christmas and for others prevails and they win a competition that will allow them to spread Christmas bonhomie on a global scale.
How cheeriffic! Baub-illiant! Sleigh-perb! and, of course, Merrynifiscent! (The Carrolls love a language centred on the season and Holly most of all).
Like everything in the Carrolls’s festive-centred world, the parade is supposedly to be excitingly straightforward – turn up, be fa-fa-fabulous to the tens of thousands watching on and make the lead float they’re in the beginning of a wonderful Christmas experience for everyone!
But life, even for people on the tinsel-draped, eggnog-awash sunny side of the street is never going to go exactly the plan and just as they’re gearing up to dress in red and make the parade the highlight of a life dedicated to being as Christmassy as possible all the time, they receive an offer they simply can’t refuse.
The famed and highly secretive Christmas Club, with a select roster of hand-picked members from the around the world, wants them to essentially audition to become part of an organisation which, as the back cover of The Christmas Carrolls: The Christmas Club trumpets in fully-capitalised glee, “spreads cheer AROUND THE GLOBE”.
Holly especially is taken with the idea of taking their brand of festive happiness and joy global, but given the secret meeting about joining is on at the same time as the parade, they have a huge decision to make – do they stick to their commitment to make the people of New York City more festively happy than they’ve ever been before, or do they take the chance, the one and only chance; if they don’t follow the white reindeer to the secret Christmas Club HQ, they won’t be given another opportunity, and ditch it to find out how they can become members of a very exclusive festive grouping?
It’s a HUGE decision, and one that would vex anyone, even a family with a donkey who thinks he’s a reindeer or a dancing penguin named Sue, and it really tests in a some fairly significant ways what Christmas REALLY means to them?
Is it possible that in the pursuit of a laudable goal that they could lose sight of why live and love Christmas all year round?
‘OK, team!’ Dad declared with a smile, tying his You Sleigh apron tightly around his waist. ‘Let’s spread cheer wherever we go …’
‘Let’s spread cheer with a ho-ho-ho!’ we chanted back.
It is entirely possible in fact but as the Carrolls grapple with whether going big or going home is the only way to go, and good lord it’s the opportunity of a lifetime, they meet beleaguered hotel worker Seb and his plucky daughter Sofia who need their help and who help the family to whom Christmas is everything reaffirm what the season means to them at its core.
It’s a sage lesson about making sure that you are really, truly living out what you love, and that in your quest to go as big as possible, that you don’t lose sight of why you began to love what you love in the first place.
As the Carrolls go all out to impress the judges of the Christmas Club, who are so hellbent on their global quest to spread as much festive cheer as possible that they seem to have lost sight of why we love and celebrate Christmas in the first place, they have to ask themselves – is going bigger better than simply concentrating on one family’s happiness and maybe inadvertently spreading some badly-needed Christmas cheer?
As always, the Carrolls follow their heart to their right place, and The Christmas Carrolls: The Christmas Club, which is full of the series’ trademark, fun, joy and escapist festive zest, is a beautiful celebration of giving and selflessness and Christmas-osity that will warm your heart, get you laughing and make you feel gloriously happy to be part of the most wonderful time of the year, not just in December and every single day of the tinsel-tastic year!