Books and Christmas – the perfect match

I had a very 1960s Irish childhood, involving coal fires, a dodgy immersion heater which produced a very specific number of hot baths weekly, The School Around the Corner with Paddy Crosbie on the radio, and bus rides to the Sugarloaf or a swim in Blackrock Baths.

No internet. No video games. And no television except at Christmas, when two men staggered in with a rented one, returning to take it away in the first week of January. Instead, it was a childhood full of books. They were usually secondhand, brought home by my father from Greens and Hanna’s, or picked up on stalls along the quays.

At Christmas, though, there were book tokens, and presents from godparents, and the books acquired then were brand new. Often they were hardbacks complete with pristine dust jackets, and the paperbacks were unscuffed. Being Christmas gifts, these books were often what the donors thought of as “Christmassy”, and, though many were about children of my own age, remarkably few reflected anything of my daily life.

In my own latest novel The Mistletoe Matchmaker my protagonist is Hanna Casey, a local librarian in a contemporary rural Irish town. At one point, her 20-year-old assistant, Conor, is setting up a Christmas display in the library.

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“Conor used to wonder why the Christmas book display was always so predictable. Each year … Miss Casey would set up an array of books under a sign that said CHRISTMAS TITLES, he’d wreathe it round with chains of silver beads, and, once again, people would be greeted by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and a range of whodunits with names like Tied Up in Tinsel and Murder for Christmas.

“Over in Children’s Corner there’d be another stand – this time without chains of beads, in case anybody swallowed one – with copies of The Tailor of Gloucester and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

“There was no point in going for other titles. People liked rereading old favourites at Christmas, and that was that.”

Such books are the literary equivalent of leftover fried plum pudding and Stephen’s Day turkey sandwiches: reassuring, comforting, and often loved all the more because you’ve read them so often you almost know them by heart.

Generally speaking, to stand the test of time they need to have some intellectual bite. It doesn’t surprise me to find readers turning up on social media telling me they can relate to the choices on Hanna’s Christmas display. Alcott’s Little Women may be nostalgic but it’s also underpinned by the author’s feisty 19th-century feminism and as strong a sense as Dickens’ of the inequities of social class.

And, while at first glance, a murder mystery may not appear cosy, PD James’ masterly survey, Talking about Detective Fiction, points out that, from Agatha Christie to her own Dalgliesh books, there’s a central assumption that trauma and violence are exceptional, not the norm. According to James, the urge to read detective fiction is as much a search for order in chaos as a desire to find out whodunit, which explains why readers return to their favourites time and again. We don’t just want to know who stabbed the body in the library, we want the reassurance of familiar processes which bring us to a desired end.

The same reaffirmation of certainties appears in Beatrix Potter, with her charming old-world illustrations and echoes of folk belief, and Dr Seuss’s solitary, grouchy Grinch who, as a character, is a children’s version of Scrooge.

The Mistletoe Matchmaker is the third in my series of Finfarran novels, which I was delighted to see a reviewer refer to as “bookish”. Hanna’s local library is a central setting in the series, and part of the fun of writing it lies in finding echoes for the themes in my own books in the books borrowed and discussed by my heroine’s readers.

For Matchmaker I needed to find a suitable title for a character in her seventies to have sent as a present to a grandchild over in Canada. It had to be a book she herself had read as a child, and would then have been contemporary. I wanted it to have an Irish setting and, preferably, to contain a reference to Christmas, which is when my own novel is set. It was only when I came to look for it that I realised how few bestselling children’s books of the 1950s and 1960s had Irish settings.

Most of the books in which I delighted in my own childhood were set in the past, or in other countries. Or both. E Nesbit’s Edwardian Treasure Seekers, Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers girls, Anne of Green Gables, and Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings and Derbyshire lived lives that were very different to mine in 1960s Clonskea. Back then, it was the norm, and I never questioned it. Indeed, the idea that books should be “relevant” to the reader’s own circumstances has always seemed to me to be daft. (And don’t get me started on the words “relatable” or “accessible”.)

I’m fascinated, as a novelist, to see how the cultural isolationism and literary censorship which still defined much of Irish life in the 1950s and ’60s was mitigated by the fact that “Irish” children’s books were then so rare. It’s pleasing to know, though, that Irish children now have Eoin Colfer to read, as well as JK Rowling, and Áine Ní Ghlinn as well as David Walliams.

Ultimately, I found the perfect answer for my character’s gift in Patricia Lynch’s 1930s book The Turf Cutter’s Donkey, which seamlessly blends fantasy with rural Irish life. My own copy had long been lost somewhere between Dublin and London and, unable to find it in a bookshop, I requested it from my local library. When it arrived it turned out to be the same edition I’d read as a child. Everything about the paper, the typesetting, and the illustrations was nostalgic, and spoke of both excitement and reassurance. I hope some child finds a copy – even if scuffed and jacketless – underneath a Christmas tree this year. Me, I’ll be rereading several cosy whodunits.