(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Is it possible to celebrate Christmas too much?
That’s not something the titular characters from Mel Taylor-Bessent’s The Christmas Carrolls might ever have said; after all, they mark the most wonderful time of the year every single day with endless roast dinners, legions of Christmas trees and a glorious singlemindedness to spread cheer wherever they go.
They love and live Christmas every single moment of every single hour etc, having taken Scrooge’s epiphanic declaration to heart long go:
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol)
But not long into book two of the series, The Christmas Competition, the Carrolls – father and mother, Nick and Snow, children Holly and younger sister Ivy, and yes, donkey-wannbe-reindeer Reggie – are invited to compete in a newspaper competition, by The Christmas Chronicle no less, and find themselves up against the Klauses, who are very, very rich, and whose festive compound is sprawlingly massive, encompassing their Klausland theme park, a personal ski mountain, and their own personal Harrods ornaments shoppers.
And that’s just to begin with!
Their home on the aptly-named Candy Cane Lane is everything the Carrolls love but on a HUGE scale and it soon becomes apparent that the lovely family we first met in The Christmas Carrolls may have met their festive match.
But that wasn’t the end of the excitement. In fact, it was barely the beginning. Because what happened next was so baubilliant, so snow-tastic, so tinsel-riffic, it would blow the beard off Father Christmas himself …
But the endlessly upbeat Carrolls always see the good and the positive in everything and so rather than falling in a. defeatist heap, Nick and Snow decide to up the rate of Nick’s uniquely festive inventions, find new and amazingly celebratory fabrics from which to weave all kinds of festive gear and devise new recipes, come up with new doorbell sounds and generally amp up the cheer until it’s delightfully deafening.
You’d expect nothing less from this chirpy, happy, jaunty and gorgeously kind and caring family whose sole mission in life is to make everyone’s life better by making sure Christmas is front and centre all the time.
But one person in the family is not as enthused, quite uncharacteristically we should add, with Holly, an emerging teenager with friends and potential non-Christmassy activities in which to partake, beginning to question whether everything has to be Christmas every single waking moment.
It’s not that she doesn’t love Christmas anymore, nor that she doesn’t love spreading cheer to those who need it most, but alongside all the festive do-gooding, she’d like to maybe do a sleepover with friends or go to a Halloween party or eat something that’s not a roast dinner.
But she knows her mum and dad would see this as some sort of betrayal, and so as preparations for the visit of The Christmas Chronicle editor to judge the Carrolls for the comp ramp up to a frienzied pace, dear sweet Holly finds herself asking if Christmas is all she wants?
At the same time as Holly’s great awakening is taking place, she’s discovering that the Klauses are a rather cruel and unusually uncaring lot.
While their home and lifestyle shows all the hallmarks of Christmas to a gobsmacking degree, they seem unhappy with each other, more apt to try to score points and impress others than spread the kind of cheer the tinseltastic Carrolls – The Christmas Competition continues the first book’s use of idiosyncratic words unique to the family, and Holly in particular, and they are a baubiliant delight throughout – do without thinking.
They are all Christmas form but no substance, but even so, the Carrolls, who seem to think they’re lovely – well Snow and Nick do; Holly and her BFF Archer know how meant they can be with the Klaus kids, Toboggan and Poinsettia (aka Toby and Seti) know better – and think that the competition is all but lost.
They’re not giving up of course; that simply not the way Nick and Snow roll, but they’re all too aware that when it comes to dazzling the editor of the paper with festiveness, the Klauses are well and truly ahead and stand the best chance of winning the main prize of going to New York City for Christmas.
Holly accepts that pretty quickly and switches her attention to trying to free the Klauses’ dancing penguins who might have their own performing rink but who seem to want to escape their seemingly perfect home (the Klauses love perfect everything but don’t realise that just thinking something is perfect, makes it so) for a less troubled life elsewhere.
I [Holly] need a break from Christmas.
There.
I said it.
It’s not that I hated Christmas all of a sudden. That could never happen. But all this trying to out-Christmas the Klauses was getting tiring. Especially as we had more hope of winning then ice hockey in the Winter Olympics (but only if Reggie was in goal).
As second books in a series go, The Christmas Competition is a sheer delight.
It continues the lovely escapist vibe of a family who love the festive season, and each other, and others, more than anything, and that can’t but make your world weary heart sing no matter how old you are, but it adds some emotional heft into proceedings, making it clear that while being all Christmassy all the time is a wonderful thing in principle, it doesn’t completely protect from the slings and arrows of life nor does it mean you’ll avoid the less wonderful parts of being human.
The Carrolls of course are better placed than most to make the very best of life, and for most of The Christmas Competition they do just that, but rather wonderfully and ultimately heartwarmingly, they also have to deal with feeling like the world can be impossible-to-counter cruel sometimes and they may not always win out by sheer, garrulous, festive cheeriness.
Well, not without some lessons being learned along the way.
It’s the insertion of some lesson-imparting reality and some home truths being shared that gives this great big warm hug of a festive novel such a joyous vibe because if the Carrolls can still be Christmassy in the face of all kinds of challenges, then so can any of us.
They still have a leg up because they do Christmassy so delightfully and escapistly well, and they will enchant you still with the way they approach the season and the world as a whole, and it’s their willingness to see the festive best (well, mostly) in everything, that makes The Christmas Competition such a festabulous Christmasriffic and merrynifiscent pleasure and the perfect antidote to all the things that ail you, whatever your age, the rest of the year.