Truly Festive Children’s Stories

Truly Festive Children’s Stories

The magic and wonder of Christmas for many readers starts with the classic Christmas tales that we read as children and the adaptations of those stories that we see on our television screens every year. However, it is with classic children’s Christmas books that we first find much of the imagery and many of the traditions that we have come to associate with the festive season.

Walt Disney, The Night Before Christmas, 1934

Walt Disney, The Night Before Christmas, 1934

 

Indeed, it is perhaps in celebration of these beloved Christmas stories, full of presents and treats and delights, that so many of the best-loved examples of children’s literature are essentially Christmas stories. For many children, Christmas is what creates a sense of magic and wonder in their imaginations and, through gifting, helps to instil a love for great books.

Does this help to explain the extraordinary longevity and emotive freshness of so many Christmas books? How is it that Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman or Father Christmas command such a special place not only with children but our own nostalgia for this time of year? Why is it that the opening lines of Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas fill us with such warmth? We delight in the brash antics and uncouthness of the Grinch, and Dr.Seuss’s illustrations for How the Grinch Stole Christmas are every bit as iconic as the classic image of Santa Claus; a naughty, impish counterpart to the gentle, kindly figure of Father Christmas.

 

Grinch Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, 1957

Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, 1957

 

You cannot mention Santa Claus without bringing up his most famous and beloved compatriot Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. Noticeably absent from the roll call of magic reindeer named in Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, Rudolph is a later addition who quite literally outshone Comet, Dasher, Blitzen and company. In 1939, Robert L. May wrote a little story for an in-store Christmas promotional giveaway. The department store was called Montgomery Ward: the story was called Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Two and a half million copies were distributed that year alone, when in 1949 Johnny Marks wrote the famous song about the reindeer who saved Christmas.

 

The first printing of the Rudolph sheet music inscribed “Dear Marlin, Merry Christmas, Johnny Marks.”

The first printing of the Rudolph sheet music inscribed “Dear Marlin, Merry Christmas, Johnny Marks.”

 

While Robert L. May is responsible for creating Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; where does our modern conception of Santa Claus come from? The image of the jolly Saint Nick with his sack full of gifts, arriving on Christmas Eve on his sleigh drawn by flying reindeer owes much to Clement Clarke Moore’s, A Visit from St. Nicholas. When it comes to Christmas there is arguably no more memorable line than: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” Not only was this poem largely responsible for many of the conceptions regarding Santa Clause from the nineteenth century on, but it also had a massive influence on popularising the tradition of gift-giving at Christmas.

A Christmas Carol is without question the most famous and well-regarded Christmas story of them all and the story of Ebenezar Scrooge’s redemption and turn toward good has been adapted countless times with both the Muppets and the Flintstones, among other children’s favourites, offering their versions of the classic Christmas tale. While not written as a story for children, Charles Dickens’s novel, much sought after by collectors, has become such an enduring classic that it has transcended its original shape to become a story for all ages celebrated and retold again and again each year.

A Christmas Carol, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1915

A Christmas Carol, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1915

 

By 1947 the modern conception of Santa Claus that we have become familiar with was almost fully formed. The white beard, red clothes, reindeer with sleigh festooned with toys. This modern depiction owes much to Valentine Davies’s screenplay and subsequent novelization for Miracle on 34th Street. Davies wrote a 120-page novella after completing the screenplay for the original 1947 film which went on to be adapted multiple times most notably by John Hughes in 1994.

Valentine Davies, Miracle on 34th Street, 1947

Valentine Davies, Miracle on 34th Street, 1947

 

Many of our favourite Christmas stories are films, however, a vast majority of these Christmas films on based on or inspired by early books and short stories. The most notable example of this is It’s a Wonderful Life, the beloved classic starring James Stewart. Based on the short story, The Greatest Gift, by Philip Van Doren Stern, originally self-published as a booklet in 1943 before being published as a book in December 1944, with illustrations by Rafaello Busoni. The story itself was loosely based on A Christmas Carol and owes much to Dickens’s original work.

Other great Christmas stories continued regularly to be written, published, animated and filmed. New classics like Raymond Briggs’s 1978 book and, still astounding, animated masterpiece, The Snowman. A tear-jerking and beautiful tragedy that manages to celebrate the joy and magic of a boyhood dreamscape, the wonder in a child’s heart at the glory of those special days—friendship and love and togetherness—and yet hides none of the bitter sorrow and sadness which mark the passing of years, the loss of fleeting moments. Those who were with us once but are missing now. The Snowman was one of those creations which seemed timeless and eternal from the very start.

Raymond Briggs, The Snowman, 1978

Raymond Briggs, The Snowman, 1978

Every year studios big and small put out Christmas movies good and not so good, and every so often a diamond emerges from the glistening paste. One such masterpiece which, like The Snowman, seemed timeless from the get go, was The Polar Express. The film was nominated for 3 Oscars but the 1985 book by Chris Van Allsburg, upon which the film was based, had gone one better having won the prestigious Caldecott medal for best children’s illustrated book of the year. The Polar Express exemplifies perfectly that quality which links so many of these enduring publications and the motion pictures that walk with them hand in hand. The quality of wonder, of magic, of the purity of childhood faith. It ends:

“At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed it fell silent for all of them. Though I have grown old, the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe,”

Chris Van Allsburg, The Polar Express, 1985.

Chris Van Allsburg, The Polar Express, 1985.

 

The Origin of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

The Origin of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

It may be the most loved Christmas Story ever written. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was a bestseller when it was published in 1843, and has never been out of print. It has inspired hundreds of stage and film adaptations and has influenced the way people around the world view Christmas. Dickens wrote four other Christmas books in the years following, yet none of them had the same impact.  What makes A Christmas Carol so special?

In February of 1843, Charles Dickens and his friend the Baroness Burdett-Coutts became interested in the Ragged Schools, a system of religiously-inspired schools for the poorest children in Britain. Bourdett-Coutts had been asked donate to them, and she requested that Dickens visit the school at Saffron Hill and report back to her. The author, having experienced poverty and child labour himself, was deeply concerned with its elimination, and believed that education was an important way to achieve this. But he was shocked by what he saw at Saffron Hill. “I have seldom seen”, he wrote to Bourdett-Coutts, “in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children” (Mackenzie, Dickens, pp. 143-44).

All that year the Saffron Hill children stayed in Dickens’ mind, and he briefly considered writing a journalistic piece on their plight. Then in October, while visiting a workingmen’s educational institute in Manchester, he suddenly thought of a way to address in fiction his concerns about poverty & greed, and A Christmas Carol was born. Once back in London, Dickens began writing “at a white heat” (ODNB), telling his friend Cornelius Felton that while composing he “wept and laughed and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner… and thinking whereof he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed” (Letters of Charles Dickens, Macmillan & Co., 1893, pp. 101-02).

It was a deeply personal and cathartic experience. Though Dickens hoped to elicit concern for poor children, represented in the story by Tiny Tim, he also wrote from a darker place. He had grown up poor and was still acutely conscious of money, never feeling comfortable that he had enough (one of the reasons he wrote A Christmas Carol was to increase his earnings during a slow period). And yet he distrusted the instinct to hoard it, and donated much to the needy. It was from these anxieties that he created Ebenezer Scrooge, one of the greatest examples of redemption in all of literature, with a life story remarkably similar to Dickens’. Scrooge is Dickens imagining “what he once was and what he might have become” (Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 412).

Dickens finished writing in only six weeks, though he was also working on Martin Chuzzlewit, and celebrated “like a madman” (Letters, p. 102). He arranged with Chapman & Hall to publish the story on a commission basis, giving him the freedom to design the book to his own high standards. Bound in pinkish-brown cloth, it included elaborate gilt designs on the cover and spine, as well as gilt edges, hand-coloured green endpapers (which were later changed to yellow because the green tended to rub off), four coloured etchings, and four uncoloured engravings. Despite the expense of printing and binding such a volume, the price was set at a low five shillings, which contributed to its popularity.

First Edition of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A copy of the first edition of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843).

As soon as it appeared, A Christmas Carol was “a sensational success… greeted with almost universal delight” (ODNB). William Makepeace Thackeray called it, “a national benefit and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness” (Fraser’s Magazine, February 1844). Published only a week before Christmas, six thousand copies sold by Christmas Eve, with sales continuing into the New Year and a pirated edition also selling briskly, much to Dickens’ dismay.

A Christmas Carol struck such a chord because it was informed by Dickens’ own troubled life, his ambivalence toward the wealth he was accruing as a successful author, and his deeply held beliefs about goodness, charity, and the sin of institutionalized poverty.  His skill as an author was drawing from the world around him, and from within himself, universal themes that have resonated with millions of readers across the years. Indeed, there seems to be something for almost everyone, at every time, in this little book. As the novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd put it,

A Christmas Carol takes its place among other pieces of radical literature in the same period… But clearly, too, there are many religious motifs which give the book its particular seasonal spirit; not only the Christmas of parties and dancing but also the Christmas of mercy and love… But it combined all these things within a narrative which has all the fancy of a fairy tale and all the vigor of a Dickensian narrative. There was instruction for those who wished to find it at the time of this religious festival, but there was also enough entertainment to render it perfect ‘holiday reading’; it is rather as if Dickens had rewritten a religious tract and filled it both with his own memories and with all the concerns of the period. He had, in other words, created a modern fairy story. And so it has remained. (Ackroyd, p. 413.)