Short Christmas Stories

This is the sixth volume in the ‘Short’ series, containing 40 very short stories about Christmas. Content varies from myths, legends and stories about Christmas to jokes and the humorous musings of Old Ted.

For a little book, the content is certainly diverse and contains something for everyone in the family to enjoy as Christmas approaches. Some of the stories are historical, recounting, for example, the incident when King Charles visited the frozen Thames in 1683 and the writing of the carol Silent Night in 1818. Some, such as ‘Brer Rabbit’s Christmas’, are perennial favourites and some, such as ‘Christmas 1914’ rework well known stories from different perspectives. Stories and jokes are carefully arranged to give variety on each page.

Although the content is both amusing and informative, it is a little difficult to define the audience with any precision. The font is too small for inexperienced readers to access with any comfort, but some of the content does not lend itself to being read aloud by an adult. A mix-and-match approach is therefore probably the most appropriate. I would also love to have known the countries from which some of the stories originated – the derivation of Native American, Cornish and Russian legends was implicit in the text, but other stories gave no contextual hint.

This is a book for dipping into and sharing during Christmas, with content to meet a range of different reading interests from humour through legend to nostalgia.