Christmas is crucial to the book trade but, in the case of children’s books, it has everything to do with a sense of wonder at the heart of winter. Some of the best classics ever written, from Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman to Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child, stem from this.
Matt Haig’s A Boy Called Christmas (Canongate, £12.99) is such a book for readers over nine. It is about the boyhood of Father Christmas – and what a miserable, lonely, hungry, chilly childhood it is. Haig’s black humour and insights into depression have made him a national treasure for both children and adults; this story, however, is about how the 11-year-old Nikolas travels north in search of his woodcutter father, accompanied by a mouse and a reindeer called Blitzen. It explains along the way how reindeer fly, why we put presents in stockings and how crackers can save lives. Brilliantly told and imagined, it is about the importance of hope and kindness and it should be in every stocking.
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