Tower and Town, December 2025 (view the full edition)A Good ReadBooks make Christmas. It's not just that they are the very best gifts (I'm a bookseller, I would say that), but in the sense that our ideas of Christmas are often formed by literature. One of my favourite novelists, Laurie Colwin, a New Yorker, said that all her ideas of delicious food, domestic life and cosiness came from reading English children's books, with detailed and idealized descriptions of cottage tea-tables. Christmas is like that. I don't think many, if any, of my childhood Christmases featured greenery and wax candles glowing on the window ledges of chilly ancient churches, much less walking back from Midnight Mass through frosty darkness to a large family party feasting round the table and playing charades (I had a perfectly happy childhood, thank you, it just wasn't like that), but that's my image of the season. All from children's books. Dyan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales always strikes me as the ultimate depiction of a perfect, imperfectly remembered Christmas, all myth and nostalgia and family lore. Every year I re-read Antonia Forest's End of Term with its glorious set-piece of the Nativity Play in the Minster (if you don't know Forest's books I have to tell you they are difficult to get hold of, but worth it, near-genius.) The Little Women giving their breakfast to the Hummels, and the Carr's food parcel in What Katy Did at School are essential reading. December is time to dust off Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising. You can't go home again. You can't step in the same river twice. I have a theory that we all (if we're lucky) get one perfect Christmas in our lives, usually when we're quite young, against which all others are measured and found faintly, poignantly disappointing. (I am of course speaking of the secular feast; the faithful among you will rightly take issue with me on this.) The Fossils have just such a celebration in Ballet Shoes. If you believe that characters go on living after the book is closed you just know that they'll always remember that Christmas Day. There are of course plenty of Christmases in adult literature. One of my educated chums pointed me to Thomas Mann, Tolstoy and Hardy for starters. I'm always keen to promote Lissa Evans, and the Christmas dinner in V for Victory is funny and touching. You'll notice I haven't mentioned Dickens, you all know my views. Whatever your Christmas is, however you celebrate, whatever you expect - we at the White Horse Bookshop wish you all the very best, and happy reading. Debby Guest |