While I am huge fan of novels aimed at adult Christmas tragics such as yours truly, there’s something innately pure and escapist about losing yourself in books aimed at children.
They draw me back to a simpler time when Christmas meant, quite apart from freedom from school bullies, the chance to decorate with handmade streamers, to play carols on the piano (not super expertly but well enough to get the job done) and to laze around reading all my favourite Christmas stories.
It was exciting because school was over and six weeks of summer holidays beckoned but also because things felt more festive and alive and just lightly happy and after a year spent trying to keep life and soul together, it felt effervescently wonderful to lay back and lose myself in magical Christmas worlds.
So, these books give me that, restoring a time of pure Christmas festiveness when everything seemed simple and fun and all I had to do was wait for Santa to fill the pillowcase at the end of my bed and to stack some presents under tree …
Jim’s Spectacular Christmas by Emma Thompson & Axel Scheffler
This is such a joy! Based on the true story of a dog who really did live in what was the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) in the mid-nineteenth century with his doting owner, Sir Henry Cole who was the museum’s director, Jim’s Spectacular Christmas by Emma Thompson and Alex Scheffler, takes some historical fact, a dash of artistic license and all kinds of whimsy and fun and delivers up an enchanting story of one dog’s trip to see Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace; a trip, by the way, that saw the creation and delivery of the first Christmas cards – Cole really did create them in 1843 – and a bond created between monarch and dog that likely lasted until he died in 1879. While there’s no proof Jim actually went to the palace, the idea that he might have, and that he might have purloined Prince Albert’s monocle to help him read – yes, Jim read, well he does in the book, and it’s delightful – makes this wholly lovely book, complete with illustrations based on Cole’s sketches of his beloved dog, feels so warm, sweet and hopeful. It’s a slice of whimsical festive storytelling that comes with that lilting playfulness the British often bring to their books for kids, as if they’re engaged in an energetically mischievous piece of conversation with their readers, and it will make you fall in love with Jim, and Victorian Christmases, and the idea of being with someone special at the most wonderful time of the year.
Christmas Lights by Ruth Symons & Carolina Rabei
A poetic picture book that is all about bring light into the snowy Christmas dark, Christmas Lights by Ruth Symons and Carolina Rabei, is a visual delight of the highest order. Spare of text, though what is on the page is gorgeously evocative and pitched just-so, this book is the perfect bringing forth of what it feels like to be out and about – in this case a little girl with her dad “ready to drive home for Christmas”, guided by the “headlights beam before us” – with the norther lights leading them back to the warmth and safety of home. With wheels to turn and pop-up elements to bring into play, Christmas Lights is a visual feast, one that brings alive what it would feel like to be out in the sky-lit dark, along lanes next to which people are ice skating and sheep are grazing, and past homes where “children are sleeping, their stockings hung out for the morning”. Here in the village, it is the lights of the shops and houses guiding them home, people making finishing touches to their trees and kids out caroling with lanterns, and when they do reach the sanctuary of their waiting family, it’s to a roaring fireplace and a cosy drift into sleep against her mum as they “think of the tree lights, the town lights and starlight – the Christmas lights guiding us home”. Just beautiful.
Marvin and Marigold: A Christmas Surprise by Mark Carthew / illus. by Simon Prescott
If Christmas is about anything, and let’s face it, it’s about all kinds of magically lovely and wonderful things, it’s the soul-satisfying act of being with other people, sometimes not even people we know very well but who need us, or perhaps we need them and the festive company they bring. Marvin and Marigold, next door neighbours in a quaint, snow-covered mousey village, unexpectedly end up spending Christmas together when a memory-stirring gift from Marigold’s mum, complete with a “tinsel-wrapped note” (the best kind!), stirs up a real sense of what the season means as all kinds of decorations emerge, along with a tree, that come with potently warm and loving memories. Brought alive and overjoyed by the gift, Marigold, spying Marvin all alone, invites him over to share in all the Christmas bonhomie with her, which he accepts with tearful alacrity, bringing over ‘biscuits and cheese on a porcelain plate”. The decorate the tree together with Marigold finding “sunbursts and snowflakes with tassels that tangled – and bright bells and baubles that dingled and dangled …” while “Marvin added dome candy cane sticks and red and green candles with wax-coated wicks”. Together at Christmas, a time where people shouldn’t be alone but too often are, Marigold and Marvin sit back with cheese and tea and take in the tree sparkling “with light and bright bells and baubles” as it “lit up the night!” That warm inner glow you feel is Christmas working its magic on two people who spend the season together and fully partake in the wondrous companionship it can offer, with this delightful told with sweet rhyming poetry and cosy illustrations and sense of the richness of belonging.