[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="384"] Christmas would have looked very different if defined by H.P. Lovecraft.... art c. Tom Brown.[/caption]

The modern Christmas owes a lot to books – first and foremost to Charles Dickens, and a Christmas Carol, which defined the imagery, the sense of duty to show up to family gatherings and the need for cheery seasonal jollity, whether you like it or not. From which you can safely infer that I am more of a ‘bah humbug’ sort of person than part of the ‘god bless us every one’ brigade. I think Clement Moore’s poem ‘Twas the Night before Christmas’ has also gone a long way towards defining what we think the season is for, and about.

How different Christmas would have been if our dominant stories had been about the Grinch, or the Krampus! Books and stories have defined this season for some 2000 years – the Bible is a book, after all. The dominant stories of the last hundred and fifty or so years have taken us away from celebrating Jesus, and towards getting excited about the gifts. We’ve moved away from the 12 days of Christmas and towards greater focus on Christmas Day. Books can have a lot of influence on what people do.

What stories do you come back to at this time of year? Pagans may be thinking of the oak and holly kings fighting, but that comes from a book, and a recent one (Robert Graves, the White Goddess). Perhaps Christmas means The Snowman (Raymond Briggs). Perhaps you turn to film, or music.

If you are inclined towards the gift buying traditions, books are good gifts. Books about the season have a definite charm, especially for younger readers, but at this time of year, a book is a present that won’t go off, can wait until things calm down and can be revisited.

I’m tempted to paint you a picture of struggling authors, Bob Cratchett style, scarf wrapped, warming thin hands over candle flames between bouts of scribbling away madly, but that might be pushing my luck slightly. Most of us type more than we write, but it doesn’t create as romantic an impression. It’s the job of authors to turn up as seasonal ghosts... we are the ghosts of Christmas Past, telling stories about how it used to be, pedalling nostalgia and rose tinted spectacles. We are the ghosts of Christmas Present, offering bounty and a reflection of the world as it is, and as we would like it to be. We are the ghosts of Christmas Yet to Come, making dire predictions about how it’s going to go horribly wrong, but unable to resist throwing a hero into the mix now and then.

 

And yes, most of us would like some figgy pudding, now that you mention it....

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