A Boy Called Christmas

A Boy Called Christmas by Matt Haig tells 8 year olds how Father Christmas began, back when he was a hungry boy in a one-room cottage in Finland.

What happens

Nikolas is eleven. He has had two presents in his entire life, a wooden sleigh and a doll carved out of a turnip. He lives with his father Joel, who chops wood from first light until dark and wears a floppy red hat with a white bobble.

The narrator talks straight to your reader from the first page, cheerfully rude about being asked how he knows any of this, and warns that anyone who thinks some things are impossible should put the book down now.

Nikolas has a mouse called Miika who wants cheese more than anything in the world and has never seen any. Miika gets his own thoughts on the page and they are the funniest thing in the book.

Then a hunter called Anders knocks on the door. The king has offered twelve thousand rubles to anyone who brings back proof that the elves are real, and he wants Joel for the expedition. Three months, the Far North, and Nikolas cannot come.

So off goes his father, wearing the red hat, dragging Nikolas's sleigh behind him. And in comes Aunt Carlotta, who is grey and thin with a mouth like a full stop, and whose first rule is that Nikolas must get up at sunrise in a Finnish summer, when the sun comes up in the middle of the night.

This is a book about a boy with almost nothing who keeps believing anyway. Believing is as good as knowing, his father tells him, and Nikolas takes it seriously.

Do read this bit before you start it together. Nikolas's mother is dead, and the book tells you how in the opening chapter. She was killed by a bear at the well when he was six, and the same bear turns up on the first page of the story. It is handled quickly and without gore, but it is there early and it is not softened, and a child who has lost someone may find it lands hard.

Aunt Carlotta is genuinely cruel too, in a fairy-tale way, and Nikolas is alone with her for a long stretch.

What to read next

If this one becomes a December favourite, The Girl Who Saved Christmas moves the story to a London chimney sweep called Amelia who needs one impossible thing.