Invasion of the Christmas Puddings

Jeremy Strong's Invasion of the Christmas Puddings is a silly Christmas adventure for 8 year olds in which the world is very nearly destroyed by pudding.

What happens

It opens with Father Christmas setting fire to his slippers in the toaster and Mrs Christmas fishing them out with the salad tongs. They shout at each other for two pages, calling each other a daft tomato and a brainless banana, and then collapse laughing.

That is the tone. Nothing is taken seriously for a single line.

Over at Plumpot Primary, Miss Comet announces that her class will be taste-testing Christmas puddings. Twenty-four children are thrilled. Four are not.

Dylan claims to be allergic, and that one crumb will set him shaking until his arms and legs and eyebrows fall off. Miss Comet says in that case they had better fetch a bucket for the bits, and excuses all four of them.

Which is lucky, because Father Christmas has an older brother.

Bad Christmas has been shut up in another dimension for hundreds of years for crimes against Christmas and has now found his way back. He builds his puddings out of Sticky Matter. He lives inside a flaming space pudding roughly the size of a football stadium. He still sucks a tartan toy monkey called Boo-Boo.

Anybody who eats one of his puddings stops being themselves. Which leaves four children who cannot stand Christmas pudding as the only people in a position to do anything about it.

The book knows precisely how ridiculous it is and keeps pointing at itself. A scientific adviser called Professor Damp-Trumpett turns up to explain Sticky Matter and laughs at his own joke. Sound effects are written into the page. Chapters break off to tell you something shocking that very few people know.

Do not be put off by the word invasion. Bad Christmas is about as menacing as a pantomime villain, and the puddings ooze and splip-splap-splop rather than actually threaten anyone.

The one thing that might trouble a younger reader is the idea of people eating something and no longer being themselves afterwards. It is played for laughs the whole way through, nobody is hurt and nobody stays that way in any frightening sense, but it is a zombie idea in a Santa hat and some children take that shape more seriously than the jokes around it.

Read it in December. It will not survive July.

What to read next

For another Jeremy Strong end-of-the-world panic, try I'm Telling You, They're Aliens! Rob worries about absolutely everything, from escaped rhinoceroses to what might be waiting round the next corner, and he has decided the new family across the road are not human.