A Book For Christmas - Selma Lagerlöf

I haven't really been feeling particularly Christmasy so far - and yes I know it's still early, but this preparatory part of the season is the bit I normally enjoy. December has so far been a blur, work has been hard (hit by IT issues) and I've been too tired to really do much more than sleep when I get home. Tonight though my mother battled through awful traffic and worse weather to help me get a tree - it took us almost an hour to get barely a mile and back. Mum is worried that I'll be disappointed with the admittedly lopsided tree we found at the first shop we went to, but it was not an evening to traipse around garden centres, supermarkets, or DIY shops in the hopes of finding something better. 

The lopsided bit is facing the corner of the room and doesn't much matter, the rest of the tree is a nice shape, it was a very acceptable price, and I think it has character. I've started candying oranges, think I'll make biscuits at the weekend, started work on a Christmas stocking, have my first card up, and finished A Book For Christmas last night - so I'm slowly getting there.

I bought this mostly because Penguin sent some really lovely promotional material into the shop with it, it was enough to make me look and that was enough to make me buy. Promotional material works. I wasn't familiar with Lagerlöf but the mood isn't far from Hans Christian Anderson - veering dark and with a strong Christian moral. I'd say it's a collection of 2 halves - the first 4 stories I really liked, the last 4 not so much. A Book For Christmas opens the collection and is charming, The Legend of St. Lucia's Day is lengthy and old fashioned but satisfying. The Princess of Babylon and the Rat Trap both hold the balance between entertainment and moral in a way that works for a modern reader.

Redbreast did not work so well for me - too much of a Sunday school feel to it, and perhaps the same for In Nazareth, although the end to that has a kick to it that lifts it a little. The Skull is an interesting mix of Gothic horror and Christian homily that sit uneasily together in my mind, and the same with the Animals' New Year Night. 

What I do like about all of these stories is the old-fashioned sense of real danger from the weather, from poverty, from starvation, and from violence. On a day I saw an advert for a children's book called Krampus' Bad Fur Day I'm feeling a need for some dark to flavour the cosiness of the season.