I’ve got a whole collection of Christmas
books and anthologies, but most of them are still boxed away. New ones somehow
fell into my lap just in time for the holiday. I love reading excerpts and
classic chapters over the festive period. It’s like dropping in to see old
friends.
I was in the Whitby Bookshop at the start
of December and their Christmas display was lit by candles, following a power
failure brought on the by the storms and flooding they’d had that week. I
discovered a new anthology put together by Vintage books that must come close
to being one of the most perfect Christmas books I’ve read.
It starts with M.R James’ ‘Oh Whistle and
I’ll Come to You’ and takes in bits of Scrooge, Jeeves and Wooster, Ratty and
Mole, the Gift of the Magi – and John Cheever’s story about the elevator man
who gets drunk and deluged with misbegotten gains. Whoever put the book
together got it just about spot on (Only an overlong and not-at-all Christmassy
tale by Edith Wharton lets the side down.) It was wonderful to hit the right
stories at just the right times over the days and nights of Christmas week. I
read Dylan Thomas in bed very last thing on Christmas Eve, and Truman Capote’s
wonderful story about Sook and the Christmas cakes on Christmas Morning.
I found another, much older anthology in
a Heaton Moor charity shop – ‘The Christmas Book’ edited by James Reeves in
1968. It’s a lovely selection, overlapping with many others, but distinguished
mainly by Raymond Briggs’ line drawings and colour plates. These include an
illustration of Paddington Bear in bed with his Christmas loot – illuminated
fuzzily by those distinctive, slightly murky, Raymond Briggs coloured pencils.
I got an amazing gift from a friend of
mine, Richard, who is downsizing his extensive book collection. Two children’s
anthologies – ‘The Mammoth Wonder Book’ from the 30s and ‘The Modern Children’s
Library of Knowledge Voume Seven: The World of Books’ from the 60s. Both from a
time when books for children were like hugely generous Boxes of Delight. They
each contains hundreds of excerpts and drawings – retelling ancient tales,
presenting bits of relatively new ones – and mixing them all up like the
ingredients of the spiciest Christmas cake you’ve ever had. A book that brings
together Dick Turpin and the Minotaur and Brer Rabbit and Eeyore is just about
perfection, I think.
Comments
Post a Comment