The Night I Met Father Christmas

Ben Miller's The Night I Met Father Christmas is a Christmas Eve story for 7 year olds about a boy who decides to go and find out the truth for himself.

What happens

Jackson's friend tells him Father Christmas isn't real. Jackson argues him down easily enough. The doubt sticks anyway.

So he makes a plan. He'll stay awake on Christmas Eve and meet the man himself.

The part where he puts his parents off the scent is very funny. He tells them he isn't that interested in Christmas and would rather work through some maths problems while listening to classical music. His mum goes off to bed sounding quite worried about him.

Then it happens, and none of it is how he pictured it. There's a bang, the ceiling shakes, and Father Christmas gets stuck up the chimney grumbling that nobody ever cleans theirs.

He's also tiny. Pointy ears, turned-up nose, red velvet cap. Jackson takes one look and works out he's an elf.

He's terrible at covering his tracks too. He claims to be a chimney inspector from the council, then insists the Lego poking out of his sack is his own because lots of grown-ups do Lego.

So Jackson asks the question he's been saving up. Not whether Father Christmas is real. How he became Father Christmas in the first place.

Most of the book is the answer, in Father Christmas's own voice. It starts somewhere your reader almost certainly won't expect. An elf town near the North Pole, a shoe factory, and a boss who disappears in the night with everybody's pension money.

If you've got a reader who always wants to know how things work, this is their Christmas book. It takes the bits they already know, the reindeer names and the sleigh and the workshop, and explains where all of it came from.

Think about this bit before you hand it over. The story opens with a friend telling Jackson that Father Christmas doesn't exist, and Jackson lying awake in the dark worrying about it. If your child hasn't met that idea yet, this book will introduce it to them.

The book's own answer is that he's real and standing right there in Jackson's sitting room. So for a child who's already hearing whispers in the playground, this one might land at exactly the right moment.

What to read next

If they finish it still wanting more of the workshop, try Adventures of a Christmas Elf. Ben Miller again, this time told by Tog, an elf who makes the toys and whose best friend is Father Christmas's daughter.