Christmas in Camelot

Christmas in Camelot is a longer, darker tree house adventure for 7 year olds, and Mary Pope Osborne opens it on a castle where nobody is celebrating anything.

What happens

Jack and Annie find a scroll tied with red velvet ribbon and covered in gold writing. A royal invitation, for Christmas Eve, at Camelot. They are beside themselves. Knights! Queen Guinevere! Sir Lancelot!

What they get is a huge dark castle against a grey sky. No light in any window. No banners on the turrets. Wind whistling through the towers, sounding sad and lonely.

Morgan le Fay did not send that invitation and has no idea who did. Camelot is not doing Christmas this year. A spell has taken all the joy out of the kingdom. No music, no celebrating, no laughter, for months on end.

Three of Arthur's bravest knights were sent to the Otherworld to fetch the joy back. They did not return. Their chairs are still at the Round Table with their names carved on them, and Jack ends up sitting in Sir Lancelot's.

The king has decided magic is to blame for all of it and banned it from the kingdom for good.

So the job is obvious, and nobody has asked the children to do it.

This is not one of the short ones. It is a Merlin Mission, and the mood is heavier than the usual daytime hop through history. The great hall is draughty and damp with no fire in the fireplace. The knights gnaw meat off bones and slurp wine without any pleasure in it. What lands in front of Jack is a greasy slab of beef on soggy bread. Your reader can feel how flat the place is well before anyone explains why.

Morgan says something rather lovely about stories along the way. A legend begins in truth, then different people in different times add to it out of their own imaginations, and that is how it stays alive. Annie's answer is that tonight they will add their part.

It helps enormously if your reader already knows the tree house books. A lot of Camelot backstory arrives in the first few chapters and it arrives fast.

There is a sadness running under all of it. Three knights are missing and presumed lost, and it is said plainly at the dinner table with their empty chairs in view. It is sad rather than frightening, but it sets a sombre tone the earlier books do not have.

What to read next

If they would rather have a castle with the feast actually going on in it, The Knight at Dawn takes them to a real one in the Middle Ages, with a secret passage and a very unwelcoming Great Hall.