A good Christmas story is like a good Christmas pudding: it needs just the right ingredients. Get the recipe wrong – too much of this, not enough of that – and you’ll come out with a stodgy, saccharine mess, or a dry, barren offering unfit for the season.
If we take a midwinter meander through some of the classic stories – and a few modern tales contending for classic status – we find there’s just a handful of key ingredients, and they’re all there in the foundational Christmas text: the Nativity story, the tale from which all other Christmas stories flow.
Let’s start with that most basic ingredient, found in every Christmas story: a child. The engine of the Nativity is the birth of a child – a very vulnerable, but very important child. If there’s a rival to the Biblical Nativity for “greatest Christmas story ever told”, then it’s A Christmas Carol. Children fill Dickens’s novella. There’s the young Scrooge himself – a metaphor for the lost innocence of childhood; Tiny Tim – the vulnerable child who must be saved, and can only be saved, by goodness coming into the world at Christmas; and the strikingly horrible apparitions of Ignorance and Want as two awful, emaciated children.
In Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, goodness is personified in “Little Cindy Lou Who, who was no more than two”, a child made miserable by the Grinch, but with the power to melt the monster’s cold heart. In the 2015 book, A Boy Called Christmas by Matt Haig, a child is once again the engine, with the travails of young, impoverished Nikolas Christmas working as a “Santa origin story”.
Even Christmas poems need children to get the verses going. Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit From St Nicholas (aka Twas the Night Before Christmas) is told from the perspective of doting parents as Father Christmas arrives with presents for their sleeping children. Santa wouldn’t be coming if there weren’t kids in that poet’s house.
Clearly, magic and the supernatural lie right at the heart of every Christmas tale. What could be more magical than a supernatural child born in Bethlehem to bring peace and love to the world? Scrooge has his ghosts, the Grinch himself is a magical creature – a sort of reverse Santa who can empty a house of presents as quick as Father Christmas can deliver them. In A Boy Called Christmas our human child Nikolas begins his transformation into Santa Claus through the magical administrations of a kindly elf who saves his life.
Suffering and poverty must also be in the mix. Why did a humble Christ come into the world after all but to lift up the poor and help the needy? So, there’s disabled Tiny Tim. There are the “Whos Down in Whoville”, terrorised by the wicked Grinch. That’s why Nikolas in A Boy Called Christmas is so impoverished – his only toy, a doll made from a turnip by his dead mother. In Dickens’s other Christmas story, The Cricket on the Hearth, we’re in a world of poor toymakers, wicked misers and blind daughters.
One theme which runs strong in nearly all Christmas stories but is often overlooked is the overtly political nature of the writing and deliberate social commentary. In truth, many Christmas yarns are pretty socialist. What’s Christ but a very woke, very redistributive leftie rebel? A Christmas Carol is an outright denunciation of Victorian capitalism – and part of Dickens’s great reforming canon. A Boy Called Christmas is filled with asides about cruelty to migrants: some elves just don’t want humans on their land and would happily build a wall to keep us out. There’s also some knowing mockery of the media in Haig’s tale, just released as a movie. Even The Grinch offers a critique of Ayn Rand-style individualism versus community.
Perhaps the best example of contemporary politics making it into a Christmas story is found in the perennial holiday favourite, It’s A Wonderful Life. Strictly not a book or short story, obviously, the movie is a hymn to the Roosevelt New Deal and an assault on powerful elites. Just listen to some of the lines put into the mouth of George Bailey, played by James Stewart, and you could mistake them for a colourful call for Corbynism.
The natural world sits right at the heart of Christmas stories too – working as a metaphor for character and theme. Think of how the blizzard in It’s A Wonderful Life arrives just as the world turns dark and menacing for George. In The Grinch, our villain lives alone on a mountain top – Mount Crumpit. Nikolas Christmas must trudge through hundreds of miles of frozen wastes to achieve his heart’s desire. Christmas, clearly, is a time when we ourselves think of the natural world – the snow, the starlight. The season brings us back in tune with a natural world we often overlook.
In Thomas Hardy’s Christmas poem, The Oxen, the natural world itself – in the shape of the animals in the farmyard – kneels to Jesus on Christmas Eve. Nature, suggests Hardy, acknowledges goodness and kindness. Nikolas Christmas has mice and reindeer to keep him company. The cricket in The Cricket on the Hearth is the guardian angel of the Perrybingle family. There’s a sense of Christmas restoring balance between us confused, lost humans – who are often outside of nature – and the natural world itself.
That makes sense as Christmas stories are essentially about restoration and redemption. The past must be confronted and changed. If the driving force of all Christmas stories is “the child”, the notion of innocence, then the end result must be hope and salvation – for isn’t that the very message of the nativity? George Bailey is saved from death because he is good at heart. Scrooge is all but dragged to hell in order to make him change his ways and become a better person. Nikolas Christmas becomes Santa because he does good in the world of the elves. The Grinch – in a wonderful melding of so many Christmas themes – is redeemed by the kindness of poor children. If you can be selfless then you can be saved, that is the message of Christmas stories.
This hope – these many acts of redemption – are nearly always bound up in family. The Cratchits, the Baileys, the parents of Nikolas Christmas, the extended family of the Whos down in Whoville in The Grinch. It’s family which sustains, that gets us through the hardships – the want and the poverty and cruelty of the rich – from one year’s end to the other.
Underlying all of these different ingredients, there’s one balancing agent: imagination, make-believe. You have to suspend your disbelief in all Christmas stories. Ghosts don’t really visit Victorian money-lenders. Green hairy monsters don’t really steal presents. Little boys don’t become Santa Claus. Crickets don’t protect you – and, if you’re an atheist like me, saviours aren’t really born in mangers.
But you’re allowed to believe all this at Christmas. You’re allowed to step outside the cruel, rational confines of the quotidian adult world. You can become a child again simply through the ineluctable power of storytelling, and for that brief period at the end of December, save your soul.
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