7. Snow Angels

On toys and Christmas Eve

The literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote an essay on the subject of ‘Toys’ in Mythologies (1957), about how they are often just shrunken versions of adult things, as if a child was ‘nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size’. In his brilliant essay (translated here by Annette Lavers) he rails against the miniature weapons, cash-tills and prams that prepare boys for a world of ‘war, bureaucracy, ugliness’ and little girls to become housewives. Through such objects ‘the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy.’ What can children do with a toy iron apart from pretend to iron for a bit and then get bored? What can they do with a toy TV controller apart from mimic their mother, and then, when they realize it doesn’t control the TV, cast it aside? These objects have a dual function for capitalism, both inducting children into accepting the norms of adult life, and creating a desire for the next, more stimulating object.

These days all toys, pretty much, annoy me with their specificity. Give a child a generic ship and all sorts of scenarios are possible: perhaps they will catch fish for their barbecue, find treasure, land on dinosaur island. Perhaps they’re violent thieves or running a monkey-rescue boat. Give your kids an Octonauts GUP-D and they’re either Captain Barnacles saving a manta ray with a net or it’s being bagged up for the charity shop. The child is just the owner of a desirable chunk of franchise; an imaginative ready-meal. Free story with every box!

Children still invent when they’re given room, though, with sticks and sheets and cardboard. Soft toys, or at least the ones that are like Dogger rather than one of the pups from PAW Patrol, can leave a space for creativity. I like the toys that require the invention of a personality, a relationship, a name (‘No, Cate, you cannot call the puffin Puffin’). Toys that require the child to become a god-like creator, breathing life into the clay or 100 per cent polyester hollow fibre stuffing.

There is a particular type of magic that features more than any other in children’s books – making the inanimate animate. Child development pioneer Jean Piaget’s theories suggest that many three- or four-year-olds operate on the simple cognitive schema that things that move are living, so believe that many objects like the sun, clouds and cars are alive. What it means to be ‘living’, to be ‘real’, is still not fully grasped. Children have historically been encouraged to act out ‘pretend’ tea parties and battles with their toys and, as Freud notes in his essay ‘The Uncanny’, ‘are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people’, so it is unsurprising that the concepts of aliveness and reality are often explored in children’s culture through such toys, from Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883), the wooden puppet who wants to be a ‘real boy’, to Pixar’s Toy Story franchise.

The Adventure of Two Dutch Dolls and a ‘Golliwogg’ (1895), written by Bertha Upton and illustrated by Florence K. Upton, an American mother and daughter, is a typical nineteenth-century example, featuring toys rising from their ‘wooden sleep’ and having an adventure. This example is particularly interesting, though, in that it is argued it constitutes the invention of the golliwog. Florence invented the name for a character based on a minstrel doll found in her aunt’s attic, wearing minstrel attire of a bow tie and tails. The huge popularity of the books in Britain and Europe (they wrote thirteen) made the toys a phenomenon, although her failure to trademark the golliwog meant they were soon being used to sell everything from marmalade to aniseed chews. Although he quickly becomes a ‘friend’ in the original story, there is a definite racism to the ‘penny wooden’ dolls’ first encounter with the golliwog, as they scream at the ‘horrid sight’ of the ‘blackest gnome’. Florence K. Upton later seems to have partly repented after ‘wog’ became a racist insult, claiming: ‘I am frightened when I read the fearsome etymology some deep, dark minds can see in his name.’

After some time spent, rather bizarrely, at Chequers, the official residence of the British Prime Minister, that first golliwog now resides in London, in the V&A Museum of Childhood. You can visit him and see that leather face, the hair made of animal fur, the red lips shut in a quiet smile. The Dutch dolls crowd around him, hands on hips or arms folded; their faces cold and pinched.

So many years later, our culture is still tainted by the uneasy legacy of Florence K. Upton’s books. A photograph from 1979 in which I am smiling, surrounded by my teddies and white toy rabbits, shows that I had a golliwog of my own.

More recently, I have been in many shops in Yorkshire that still sell them. Sentimental for the idyll of childhood, we maintain the myth of its utter innocence. We wilfully forget that though babies may be ignorant, there are always adults consciously manufacturing objects, fears and desires. Pulling the strings.

Perhaps one of the twentieth-century illustrators most associated with living toys is William Nicholson, an illustrator and theatre designer who made the sets for the first dramatization of Peter Pan for J. M. Barrie. He had a dramatic family life. After eloping with his wife Mabel in 1893, they had four children, one of whom became the famous painter Ben Nicholson, while another married the poet Robert Graves. Christopher was an architect and Anthony died in France of wounds during the First World War. Mabel herself died in 1918 of the Spanish Flu epidemic. William Nicholson’s housekeeper, Adèle Marie Schwarz, was for many years also his mistress.

His masterpiece was Clever Bill (1926), which Maurice Sendak called ‘among the few perfect picture books for children’ and Shirley Hughes has praised as a neglected classic. In Clever Bill the postman brings Mary a letter, asking her if she would like to visit her aunt. In her rush to pack she forgets her toy soldier, clever Bill Davis, who sets off in pursuit. There are few words, yet there is an amazing ratcheting up of anticipation and tension – some of the pages simply have the word ‘and!!’ on them. It is like the dash to the airport at the end of a rom-com.

In The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) by Margery Williams, which William Nicholson also illustrated, the Skin Horse famously explains to the Velveteen Rabbit how ‘Nursery magic’ works. ‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ but rather: ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’ It’s the same message repeated in the Toy Story movies. In such a system, a lonely or isolated individual cannot be real. Realness is something conferred by others, that can only arise through relationships. (Did Nicholson’s attentions make Adèle Marie Schwarz feel ‘real’?)

In the same year as Clever Bill, the writer A. A. Milne and illustrator E. H. Shepard released Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), about the toys of Milne’s son, Christopher Robin. The original stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga and Tigger are now on display in the New York public library. Our first glimpse of Winnie-the-Pooh is of him being dragged carelessly down the stairs: ‘bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head’. In his ownership of the others, Christopher Robin is treated as a kind of Adam, masterful and benign – ‘more like a kindly uncle than a child’, Frank Cottrell Boyce has noted.

Numerous accounts have already been written of A. A. Milne and his son Christopher Robin, who found his starring role in the books a burden, saying: ‘it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.’ As a small boy Christopher Robin was photographed in smocks and with his toys, interviewed, encouraged to star in a Pooh pageant in Ashdown Forest as himself and to make a novelty record of Milne’s poems set to music called The Hums of Pooh. He was also, inevitably, later bullied remorselessly at school, with other boys playing the record over and over. Like Alastair or ‘Mouse’, the son of Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), who lay down on a railway track and killed himself, or John Uttley, who only survived his mother Alison Uttley’s death by two years before he drove his car off a cliff, Christopher Robin will always be remembered as one of the children somehow sacrificed to children’s literature, the books supposedly written for them taking precedence in their parents’ lives. Christopher Robin’s real life was stolen and made unreal.

Winnie-the-Pooh has one or two pictures on every spread, often inserted into the text in interesting, integral ways. E. H. Shepard’s landscapes were directly inspired by Ashdown Forest, where Christopher used to play – its bracken, gorse, pines and silver birches – and the toys often look slightly battered, giving a pleasing texture of reality that grounds Milne’s whimsy. The book also seems to belong in the nursery (my copy is inscribed ‘Love to our darling Clare on her first Christmas’). Yet the text to image ratio is too heavy, really, for it to satisfy as a picture book. Even reading it now, to my five-year-old, I find myself having to do spontaneous heavy abridgement, skimming over whole conversations and (especially) Pooh’s twee songs just to keep the plot moving.

My father loved Winnie-the-Pooh in his own childhood, and Edgworth’s village wood became our own Hundred Acre Wood, with our den and muddy patch and expeditions, the Pooh-sticks Bridge, the place we saw Owl, the tracks we would make in the snow. But I think I was probably fonder, like many children, of my father’s fondness of the books than the books themselves, and rereading them I often think of Dorothy Parker’s acid review of The House at Pooh Corner (1928) in The New Yorker. (After quoting Pooh’s hum ‘The more it / SNOWS-tiddely-pom’, she notes: ‘In fact, so Good a Hum did it seem that he and Piglet started right out through the snow to Hum It Hopefully to Eeyore. Oh darn—there I’ve gone and given away the plot. I could bite my tongue out.’)

By the time I was a child, there was also the flood of Disney tie-ins. At Christmas, I would usually get something with Pooh on it, while my sister got something featuring Piglet. I think I took this as confirmation that she was cuter than me, and vaguely resented being equated with that greedy, tubby, silly blond bear with his icky name. In fairness, though, it seems that ‘poo’ wasn’t used to mean faeces until the 1930s, and ‘pooh’ is meant in the sense of an exclamation used to express irritation or disgust (the dictionary gives the example ‘Oh pooh! Don’t be such a spoilsport!’), used perhaps (there are various accounts) because Pooh was always blowing flies off his nose.

Winnie seems to have come from a female bear at London Zoo. Milne recounts that on first hearing the name Winnie-the-Pooh he said, ‘But I thought he was a boy?’ and Christopher Robin replied, ‘He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what “ther” means?’ Milne’s account is jocular about how this is ‘all the explanation you are going to get’. It seems a good explanation to me, though. ‘Ther’ was clearly not meant as a determiner at all, but a masculine name ending – as adding ‘-ella’ to Nigel makes the girl’s name Nigella, so Christopher thought adding his own ‘-pher’ to Winnie would make Winnipher, a boy’s name.

It was really Winnipher Pooh.

Enid Blyton, who interviewed A. A. Milne and Christopher Robin for Teacher’s World early in her career, also famously brought toys to life in her stories for the smallest children, particularly those about Toyland. Blyton was born in 1897 in East Dulwich, South London, on Lordship Lane (I regularly pass her blue plaque above the Builder’s Merchants). A phenomenon who produced a disturbing number of titles (at some points averaging 50 a year, and probably publishing somewhere between 600 and 700 altogether – even she lost track), Blyton told psychologist Peter McKellar:

I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knee – I make my mind a blank and wait … The first sentence comes straight into my mind, I don’t have to think of it – I don’t have to think of anything.

She always wrote after breakfast with her Moroccan red shawl nearby, tapping into her ‘undermind’, producing up to 10,000 words of this writing a day, like a computer running a program to generate prose. Clearly a workaholic, she wrote the ENTIRE contents of her regular magazine, Sunny Stories for Little Folks. Her famous signature soon commanded brand loyalty; by 1958, there were 52 separate companies dealing with her non-book merchandising. Blyton was so dominant in the market that she seems to have stirred particular animosity in her peers. Kathleen Hale was first inspired to create her beloved books about Orlando the Marmalade Cat out of sheer loathing for Blyton, whom she nicknamed ‘the Pied Blighter’. Blyton’s neighbour Alison Uttley, ever malicious, called her a ‘vulgar, curled woman’.

Blyton’s own life also became, in a way, part of the brand – in an early article she declared: ‘I love pretending myself.’ Blyton conjured an idyllic homelife, writing in The Story of My Life: ‘we are a happy little family … How could I write good books for children if I didn’t care about my own? You wouldn’t like my books, if I were that kind of mother!’ Yet the memoir fails to mention her affair and subsequent divorce (and the fact she denied her first husband access to his children) and was in many ways just another work of fiction. In A Childhood at Green Hedges (1989), her daughter Imogen recalls Blyton as ‘without a trace of maternal instinct’, having small fans round for games and afternoon tea but mainly ignoring her own children. Most upsettingly, Imogen only remembers her mother reading her a story on a single occasion.

It has been noted that when Blyton discusses ambition in The Story of My Life, the words she quotes – without acknowledging the source – belong to Lady Macbeth, the ultimate embodiment of maternal ambivalence.

We fail!

But screw your courage to the sticking place,

And we’ll not fail!

[Exclamation marks Blyton’s own]

Blyton is mainly remembered now for her work for slightly older children: The Famous Five, Malory Towers. Her Mary Mouse books (1942–64), largely illustrated by Olive F. Openshaw, are out of print, though they were once popular enough to merit her churning out twenty-three titles in the series. They tell how, exiled from her mousehole for being too tidy, Mary Mouse becomes a maid at a doll’s house, working for Daddy Doll, an ex-sailor doll with a blond moustache, and Mummy Doll who ‘needs to rest a lot’ because ‘the children make her very tired’. It is notable that the animal is subordinate to the humanoid; the born subordinate to the modelled – Blyton again privileging fantasy over reality. With their unusual format, 15 × 7 cms softback pictorial, and limited colours, they have become highly collectable.

Then, of course, there are the Noddy books (1949–63) illustrated by the Dutch artist Harmsen van der Beek (or simply ‘Beek’). They came from the conscious intention to create a Disney-style focus character – a European competitor to Mickey Mouse. The idea was conceived by one of Blyton’s publishers, Sampson Low, Marston and Company, who in 1949 arranged a meeting between Blyton and Beek. Although they had to use an interpreter, he sketched Toyland, and after what sounds, by her standards, a relaxed four days, Blyton sent over the text of the first two books. Soon a ‘Noddy Licensing Co.’ had been set up to deal with the merchandising.

Noddy – like Pinocchio – is crafted by a woodcarver but flees in fear when a wooden lion is made, and is befriended by a Brownie, Big Ears. Taken to Toyland, where the houses are built from colourful building blocks, he has to undergo a trial to prove he is a ‘real’ toy. Later he becomes a taxi driver for the other toys, driving a car with a horn that goes ‘parp parp’: there is Mr Wobblyman, one of those dolls that can’t lie down (basically a Weeble), a skittle family, a clockwork clown. There are also golliwogs. Even those who insist Upton’s books are innocent fun find it hard to defend Here Comes Noddy Again (1951), where the golliwogs basically car-jack Noddy in the dark, dark wood (‘Three black faces suddenly appeared in the light of the car’s lamps’) and strip him. It has been noted, though, that Toyland is rife with criminals of all types. The academic David Rudd has argued in his fascinating study Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature that, in many ways, the books themselves are about consumerism: from the bookplates at the start that stress ownership, to the characters’ perpetual concern with money, property and theft. It makes sense – as a society we have always used toys to teach children about ownership: wanting and having. There is even one disturbing book in which, Rudd notes, Father Christmas visits Toyland ‘like some turkey-farmer examining his seasonal stock’.

As an adult, it’s hard not to find some of these living toys uncanny, as Freud explored in his essay unpacking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story ‘The Sandman’ (1817), with its lifelike doll, Olympia. It is the uncertainty as to whether she is real or not, subject or object, that makes her creepy, like waxworks or puppets or epileptic seizures which ‘excite in the spectator the feeling that automatic, mechanical processes are at work’. These things are familiar yet not – unheimlich, or unhomely. In Freud’s view the uncanny is also related to the return of repressed infantile material.

As children, we create doppelgängers through self-love to ensure our immortality. Our dolls are our other selves; the ‘living doll’ not an object of fear but of desire. As grown-ups, though, we find the return of these doubles dreadful. In The Country Child, Uttley has a chapter in which Susan, getting older, suddenly sees in her doll, Rose, an ‘idol’ who looks out ‘pitifully with her blind all-seeing eyes’. She strips the doll and tries to drown her in the water troughs but, being wooden, ‘Like a live thing Rose sprang up and lay floating, a brown Ophelia among the oval damson leaves.’ There is something about the way our childish longings won’t be suppressed that is profoundly disturbing. When we try to bury them, they bob back up.

Now the boundaries between toys and living beings are blurring, our childhood wishes becoming adult realities. We read in the news about Hello Barbie, with its 8,000 pre-programmed lines of chat that respond to their playmate’s vocabulary choices (You said you wanted to be a veterinarian when you grow up; why don’t we talk about animals!), and stores a record of all its conversations with a child for up to two years. The pink Furby with an unsecured microphone that a stranger within 100 feet can speak through. The My Friend Cayla doll with waist-length golden hair, that collects audio files of the child’s voice, name, location and IP address, and that The Mirror hacked so it could quote Hannibal Lecter and Fifty Shades of Grey.

For how long will picture books about living toys, that explore the boundaries between fantasy and reality, even make sense to our children? In our increasingly atomized society, it sometimes feels as though reality is draining from all of us. We’re simulacra of ourselves, posing on Facebook for bots, lacking the relationships that solidify our sense of self. Or is social media making us more real – multiplied into immortality; ♥ed and liked into existence by thousands of followers? Will AI become real when it is loved? What is ‘real’ anyway?

Perhaps children can ask Alexa in their bedrooms, before she reads their bedtime stories and switches off the light.

Christmas is something that many of these books about toys have in common. It is depicted as a period when toys come to life. Christmas is, after all, when the impossible becomes possible. A time of miracles – visits from angels; the star above a stable; God as a tiny human. I am always moved by Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Oxen’ (1915) about the belief that at midnight on Christmas Eve the animals kneel.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

‘Come; see the oxen kneel,

‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,’

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

A similar concept – that animals can talk on Christmas Eve – is present in Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester. Many picture books also use this idea of Christmas as a time of miracles reliant on a child’s belief, as in Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express (1985), where a boy is given one of Santa’s sleigh bells and tells us: ‘At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them.’ It only rings for those who ‘truly believe’.

For a child too, toys and Christmas are virtually synonymous. When I think of Christmas I think of agonizing over The List. Skipping around the coffee table until I got dizzy, singing: ‘It’s the Eve of Christmas Eve.’ I’d wake in absolute dark to feel for my grandad’s football sock at the end of the bed, bumpy with chocolate money and geegaws; a smooth red apple in the toe. Wait outside the lounge while my dad in his striped pyjamas – dark hair crazed by sleep, blue eyes bleary with a hangover – ‘checked’ that Father Christmas had visited. ‘He’s been!!’ my dad would exclaim, and we’d rush in giddy with our luck to see treasures heaped in the shadows: a Wonder Woman costume, annuals, selection boxes, a rocking horse, an erected wigwam that made my sister shout, ‘Yay we’ve got a triangle!!’ We opened our presents while Mum fried bacon for sandwiches.

The poet Dylan Thomas, in A Child’s Christmas in Wales (which I have as a picture book, illustrated by the gifted Edward Ardizzone), has a wonderful passage in which he distinguishes between ‘Useful Presents’ from aunts – mittens, vests and ‘pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles’ pond and did and drowned; and books which told me everything about the wasp, except why’ – and the marvellously ‘Useless Presents’, including jelly babies, false noses, mewing ducks and painting books in which he could paint the sheep ‘sky-blue’. In his memoir The Bucket, Allan Ahlberg writes beautifully too about the pillowcase he would find filled on Christmas morning, and how his abiding memory is not the opening but the anticipation: ‘that first glimpse on the landing, the mysterious shape, and all my little heart and soul swept up, consumed, in the discovery of it’.

Such is the power of children’s desire that it becomes a kind of conjuring, an animating force, in many tales of Christmas Eve. The Velveteen Rabbit is first discovered in a stocking with ‘nuts and oranges and a toy engine, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse’. The story of the Dutch dolls takes place ‘on a frosty Christmas Eve’, with ‘Peggy Deutschland’ telling the other doll:

Get up! get up, dear Sarah Jane!

Now strikes the midnight hour,

When dolls and toys

Taste human joys,

And revel in their power.

E. T. A. Hoffmann also wrote ‘The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’ (1816), a story in which, in a weird blurring of belief systems, Christmas presents are delivered by the Christ Child flying on ‘glowing clouds’. On Christmas Eve a girl called Marie sees toys come to life and do battle with mice. After she has sacrificed many of her presents to protect him, the Nutcracker leads Marie through the door of a closet into another realm: the tinsel and sparkle of ‘Christmas Wood’, the Marzipan Castle. They become engaged, before Marie leaves the ordinary world forever, abandoning reality for the ‘Kingdom of the Dolls’. It has become the basis of Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet The Nutcracker and is often retold in picture book form – the version I own is translated by Ralph Manheim and illustrated by Maurice Sendak after he made sets for the ballet.

And who can forget another festive story in which a child’s playmate becomes animate? On the 26th of December 1982, when I was four, Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman was first shown on Channel 4. In fact, The Snowman (1978) wasn’t specifically intended to be a Christmas book. Although it is full of wintry magic, there is no tree or tinsel in the boy’s house. But the television adaptation chose to add a cameo from Father Christmas, perhaps inspired by Briggs’ 1973 book of the same name. Now no Christmas seems complete without that satsuma nose and those coal eyes being pressed into snow. That strange, muted light of the pencil crayon drawings; the moment where the snowman tips his hat.

I like no sound better than the hush of falling snow.

My father was romantic (in the true sense, my mother always says) about the rituals and rhythms of the year, and I am too. Pantomimes, tulips, April Fool’s jokes, felt-tipped eggs, the pock of tennis balls at Wimbledon, lollies, sniffing roses, Punch and Judy, new pencil cases, rain on the roof, conkers, fireworks, treacle toffee. I love that the circus comes once a year to Peckham Common. Like my dad, I am particularly romantic about Christmas. Each year, our family would walk to the church in our village in the dark – beside the frozen reservoir, then up the hill. When we got there they would be lighting candles at the end of every pew. Then the lights went off, so there was nothing but their flickering and the pastel twinkling of the Christmas tree. One year my sister had a stomach bug, so I just went with my dad. I remember holding his hand when it started to snow. His favourite carol was always ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, based on the poem ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Christina Rossetti:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter long ago.

White Christmases were something we all dreamed of, even though snow was common then. Edgworth was high up, and we’d often get cut off by it, or the school would be shut, so we’d go sledging. Now, in London, my son reached four without even seeing snow stick to concrete – for years it pained me how common it was in his stories; how much he yearned for it.

Snow, of course, is beautiful on the page. All that clean white paper. One of the most beautiful picture books ever made is Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day (1962), in which Peter, the protagonist, simply explores the snow in Brooklyn. The French novelist Henry de Montherlant famously claimed that happiness can’t be captured in books as it ‘writes in white ink on a white page’, but Keats manages to catch the fleeting, swirling nature of it. The snow is torn paper, meringue. It is cities in the clouds; whipped dusklight; pearlescent, rainbow-lit like bubble bath; lilac stippled. Peter uses it as a canvas for crunchy blue tracks and snow angels. Keats used collage cut-outs made from different types of paper, handmade snowflake stamps; India ink spattered with a toothbrush. He wrote that he was playing like a child in ‘a world with no rules’.

Ezra Jack Keats changed his name in 1947 to avoid anti-Semitism. He was actually born Jacob Ezra Katz in 1916 in Brooklyn, the third child of Polish-Jewish immigrants. Although the family was very poor, Ezra was artistic from an early age, making pictures out of whatever scraps he could collect. His father, a waiter, tried to discourage his son, claiming that artists lived terrible lives, but also sometimes brought home tubes of paint, claiming: ‘A starving artist swapped this for a bowl of soup.’ During the Great Depression, Keats painted murals as part of the New Deal program, and backgrounds for the Captain Marvel comic strip. Drafted during the Second World War, he helped design camouflage patterns. Afterwards, he spent a year as a painter in Paris, before returning to New York to do commercial work, including illustrations for Playboy and store windows on Fifth Avenue.

The Snowy Day was only his second picture book, but it won the Caldecott Medal and became an instant classic. It is now considered a milestone for featuring one of the first African-American protagonists in a picture book. Peter was based on a series of photographs of a three- or four-year-old African-American boy about to have a blood test that Keats clipped from a May 1940 issue of Life magazine, then later pinned on his wall. Keats spoke of being captivated by the boy’s expressive face and attitudes. Peter’s dark skin and red snowsuit are indeed stunningly beautiful against the whitened city.

The book was controversial amongst civil rights activists, who had mixed reactions. The poet Langston Hughes wrote Ezra a letter praising the book and teachers wrote saying, ‘The kids in my class, for the first time, are using brown crayons to draw themselves.’ But many people assumed Keats was black and, he noted, ‘were disappointed that I wasn’t’. Nancy Larrick wrote a famous article in 1965, ‘The All-White World of Children’s Books’, arguing that: ‘Although his light skin makes him one of the world’s minorities, the white child learns from his books that he is the kingfish’ and railing against these ‘gentle doses of racism’. In it she attacked Keats, saying the boy’s mother ‘is a huge figure in a gaudy yellow plaid dress, albeit without a red bandanna’. The implication was that The Snowy Day referenced the ‘mammy’ or ‘Aunt Jemima’ stereotype. Keats replied angrily that: ‘I wish Miss Larrick would not project upon me the stereotypes in her own mind.’ That she also faulted him for not using the word ‘negro’ seems to have particularly stung, given the anti-Semitism Keats had himself experienced. He demanded to know whether, in an illustrated book for three- to six-year-olds, where skin colour is visually apparent, it was ‘necessary to append race tags? Might I suggest armbands?’

I’m glad if artists don’t always default to white children; convinced by Keats when he says of Peter: ‘My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along.’ But it’s worth noting that The Snowy Day raises an ongoing problem in picture books. Representation on the page is seen as enough for the black child, or at least to tick the publisher’s diversity box, yet there is (still) a staggering absence of black, Asian and minority ethnic writers and illustrators. Who gets to tell the stories is important: they get to shape our children’s way of seeing the world. Almost every time I googled a supposedly ‘diverse’ picture book considered a classic during my research – Handa’s Surprise, Corduroy, Amazing Grace, Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes – I was uneasy when the trail led me back again and again to blinding whiteness.

In the most moving part of The Snowy Day, Peter makes a firm snowball and puts it in his pocket ‘for tomorrow’, then goes into his warm house to take off his wet socks and have a bath. Before bed he realizes: ‘His pocket was empty. The snowball wasn’t there. He felt very sad.’ Nothing is left but a damp stain on the red suit. It seems like a first taste of transience – of mortality – but then Keats relents and ends his story hopefully. The next day the snow is replenished and Peter goes out to play in it with a friend.

Raymond Briggs must have surely had this book in mind when he wrote The Snowman’s famous, bleaker ending, which has left millions of children bawling with grief over their holidays. Briggs is a self-confessed hater of the season, apparently as grumpy as his depiction of Father Christmas (‘BLOOMING CHIMNEYS!’), saying of Christmas Day: ‘I’d like to go down into an Anderson shelter and wait for it to blow over.’ He is also not that keen on children. As such he is unrepentant about the toddler tears: ‘The snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There’s nothing particularly gloomy about it. It’s a fact of life.’

By the time Briggs wrote the book he had already experienced a lot of death. Briggs was born on 18 January (also A. A. Milne’s birthday) in 1934, in Wimbledon Park. His parents, the basis for his book Ethel and Ernest, were a milkman and a former lady’s maid. Raymond himself was an evacuee at the age of five, and later did National Service. It was only after this he joined the Slade School of Art and began to illustrate. In 1963 he married a painter, Jean Taprell Clark. She had schizophrenia, ‘and we got married mainly because I thought it would help her mental state – give her a feeling of stability’. His parents both died in 1971 and his wife died in 1973, of what he calls ‘schizophrenia combined with leukaemia’.

Briggs has said though that: ‘Schizophrenics are inspiring people. Her feelings about nature and experiences of life were very intense.’ A type of psychosis, schizophrenia also means a person may not always be able to distinguish their own thoughts and ideas from reality. There is something uncanny about schizoaffective disorders: unheimlich. When are you speaking to the real person? When are they hacked or puppeted by ‘automatic, mechanical processes’? And the sufferer themself often moves in an unhomely world. What is real? What is animate and what is inanimate? What to believe?

There is something about the cold figure of the Snowman coming to life that makes me think of the ending in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The statue of Hermione, thought dead, beginning to breathe. The unbearable hope of it:

O, she’s warm!

If this be magic, let it be an art

Lawful as eating.

The Snowman begins as an opening up of possibilities. It is about being young: it is morning; it is snowing; the world is a new canvas, waiting for us to make our marks and create something. What the boy wants to create is a companion. After building the snowman, he is excited. He wants to look at it, to be with it. He keeps getting out of bed to check on it, like a new dad checking the cot. Once the snowman comes to life he behaves like a big toddler that the boy must teach about cats and light switches and fire. He unrolls too much kitchen roll; licks ice cubes. And then the snowman seems to age, putting on the father’s tie and glasses; learning to work the car. They party with games and balloons, dine together. Eventually they take flight and travel across the South Downs to Brighton, with its pavilion and pier, and watch the sunrise. It is a shared lifetime concentrated in one night.

The wordlessness is the silence of snow. It also makes it feel like a montage used in a film to show the passing of time. They hug and say goodbye.

There is a page near the end, after the boy goes to his bed, that is almost shocking in the way it holds its gaze – twelve images of a child unconscious: snuggling, writhing, changing pose. It forces us to question the reality of what we have witnessed. Has the narrative actually rewound? It appears to show us the whole story again, from a different angle – from outside rather than within the dream.

The Snowman ends with the unbearable truth of daylight. The boy is drawn with his back to us, so we cannot see his reaction to the loss of his friend – we fill him with our own feelings; our own sorrow.

Sometimes our desire and our reality don’t match. Sometimes beloved bodies fail and fall. It is an important lesson for children to learn – I know, I know – but the hardest.

Hans Christian Andersen was a cobbler’s son. In his autobiography, The Fairy Tale of My Life (1855), he wrote of his father dying, aged just thirty-two, when Hans was eleven. In the beautiful translation by W. Glyn Jones we hear how:

His corpse was left lying on the bed, and I slept on the floor with my mother; and a cricket chirped throughout the night. ‘He is dead already,’ my mother called to it. ‘You need not call to him; the Ice Maiden has taken him,’ and I understood what she meant. I remembered the previous winter when our windows were frozen over; my father had shown us a figure on one of the panes like that of a maiden stretching out her arms. ‘She must have come to fetch me,’ he said in fun.

One of the things Andersen had left to remember his father by was a little puppet theatre he had given him, from which the sense of himself as a storyteller grew. At the age of seventy he would write, still, of that lost childhood home:

One little room, a scullery,

Kindliness and quiet things;

Never a Christmas Eve like that

In all the palaces of kings.

My own father died fifteen years ago. By then he had left the school and was running the village off-licence: his name, Albert Pollard, over the door. He was in heaven, at the centre of the village that he loved, amongst the fridges of beer, the jars of Liquorice Torpedoes, the videos he could watch over and over with no late fees; being nosey, dispensing advice and fortunes to the villagers. Totting up his profits every evening with unflagging enthusiasm: our best Wednesday in June before 7 p.m. ever!

That autumn, when he was given the cancer diagnosis, he said that it was because we had been too lucky.

It was over very quickly. He died at Christmas. Just a couple of days afterwards, on Christmas Eve, the village carol singers came round. They knew we were grieving and didn’t want to disturb us, but sang ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ in our yard, in memory of my father.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb,

If I were a wise man, I would do my part,

Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

We sat in the dark by the window, listening, tears sluicing down our faces.

My heart it melted away as snow.

Afterwards, on New Year’s Eve, we buried him. It snowed that night. When I heard snow was forecast, I felt a stupid little thrill, because it had to be him, you see? Because it had to be a sign. Because I still believed.

But we are the snow.

Wait, though. I can’t end it here.

Of course Christmas makes some grown-ups a little maudlin. When you’ve had too much port and a child puts her paper crown on upside down, it’s hard not to mourn the moment even as you’re in it. How many Christmas Days will we all have together? Since I’ve become a mother I can’t pass an hour without seeing death everywhere: exhaust fumes, sugar, Wi-Fi radiation. I can’t open a first-floor window without imagining my child plunging out of it. How am I supposed to leave a stocking full of choking hazards at the end of my daughter’s cot and not wake up fretting about life’s transience?

The ending of The Snowman aside, though, I shouldn’t project this bitter-sweet grief on to everyone. My father, an incorrigible optimist, made for the merriest Christmases: inviting over random guests who were on their own, playing Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ at full blast, topping up everyone’s glasses. When I was a child I was only conscious of Christmas as pleasure: nice food, treats, new books, family. TV as well. Normally it was just an occasional treat – The Sooty Show, Button Moon, Rainbow, Play School – but at Christmas the television was on for hours: Coronation Street specials with drawn-out death scenes, Boxing Day sport, movies. How I loved, as soon as I was old enough, to ring in biro all the shows I wanted to watch in the double-issue Radio Times! What happiness, to curl up next to my dad on the sofa, head against his jumper, a box of Quality Street open on the coffee table and watch reruns of Flash Gordon or Live and Let Die.

Having children has given my Christmases back some of that joy. And also joy in TV. Recently, the Christmas shows we love most as a family are based on books: The Snowman and the Snowdog; We’re Going on a Bear Hunt; the ‘Mog’s Christmas Calamity’ advert (the Sainsbury’s ad, which I had to replay a zillion times on YouTube while Gruff wept at the hilarity); Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. Then there are the Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler adaptations by the BBC and Magic Light, whose premieres every year on Christmas Day have become another ritual, watched on the sofa after Christmas dinner as I try to drink red wine with a child under each arm and no spillage.

The Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler collaborations are interesting in the story of picture books. They do not have a single, focal character in their work – like Paddington or Maisy Mouse – with most books being freestanding (give or take the odd sequel). Yet somehow Donaldson and Scheffler, a German illustrator, have become one of the strongest brands in publishing.

They first worked together on A Squash and a Squeeze in 1993, based on a song Donaldson wrote during her many years writing for BBC Children’s TV (she even wrote songs for Play School), and drawing on an Eastern European Jewish folk tale. Then, in 1995, Donaldson seems to have come across a version of a traditional Chinese story, which first appears in the ancient book Intrigues of the Warring States, about warfare during the fifth to third centuries BC, as a political allegory about a much-feared general who is actually just claiming credit for the might of the king’s army.

In the tale, a tiger is persuaded not to eat a fox after the fox insists he is more powerful. The tiger is incredulous, but the fox says that if he wants proof he only has to walk behind him. When all the animals they meet seem terrified, the tiger misinterprets this as due to the fox’s reputation (rather than his own appearance) and runs away. It is a classic trickster narrative. In Chinese idiom ‘a fox exploits a tiger’s might’ is a common phrase (狐假虎威) that has evolved from this text, and actually refers to people who turn into bullies when they have powerful connections. Donaldson metamorphosed the fox, with all its ambiguous symbolism, into a smaller, more innocent mouse and made him the hero.

‘Tiger’ is impossible to rhyme with (you’ve basically got a ‘Geiger’, which is a lunar impact crater on the far side of the moon, or a ‘Liger’, which is half lion, half tiger so feels like a cheat). Already a perfectionist in terms of rhythm and rhyming pairs, Donaldson decided she had to invent a monstrous beast too. With his ‘terrible teeth’ and ‘terrible claws’ the Gruffalo is clearly a descendant of Sendak’s Wild Things. Various names were brainstormed (Grobstrip, Shroop, Tigelephant, Wiger, Snorgle, Margelchimp …) before Gruffalo was decided upon, sounding like Buffalo but fiercer (‘Grrrr’ being a fierce noise), and also allowing her to rhyme with ‘know’. The whole tale is in a way one about the fluidity of knowledge. The mouse’s lies about a Gruffalo turn out to be prophecy; his lies about being the wood’s most terrifying creature also somehow become true: all the others are left shaken by their encounters with him, and the Gruffalo flees. He fakes it until he makes it, with what we ‘know’ exposed as assertion or illusion. The listening child, for much of the book, is also always in the position of knowing something a character on the page does not. It is a beginner’s guide to dramatic irony.

The Gruffalo was sent to Reed Books in 1995, but there was no interest until Donaldson sent the text to Axel Scheffler, whom she had met only briefly since the publication of A Squash and a Squeeze. Within days, Alison Green at Macmillan Children’s Books made an offer for The Gruffalo. It was illustrated by Scheffler, working with a dip pen for the black outlines, then covering the drawing with ink and using coloured pencils on top, to create a meticulously detailed Germanic fairy-tale forest. His first images had the mouse wearing a Bavarian hat and Lederhosen, but Donaldson soon received a phone call from Alison asking: ‘Do you envisage these animals wearing clothes?’ The Gruffalo himself was based on medieval drawings and deemed too scary – Scheffler’s editor told him to make the Gruffalo rounder and more ‘cuddly’. The resulting creature is the perfect children’s monster, a bit icky (black tongued), a bit scary (claws), but also a bit of a teddy bear. The book was finally published in 1999.

The United Kingdom’s Net Book Agreement, which came into effect on 1 January 1900, involved retailers having to sell books at agreed prices. It essentially offered publishers protection from discounting, enabling them to subsidize less widely read authors with best-sellers. In many ways, I think it could be argued that protection allowed for the incredible golden age of picture books in the twentieth century, with publishers able to take creative risks with often technically complicated, full-colour books because the hungry caterpillars and clothed rabbits were subsidizing the rest. It is interesting, I think, that in March 1997, in the period in which The Gruffalo was lying on publishers’ desks, the Restrictive Practices Court ruled that the Net Book Agreement was against the public interest and therefore illegal. Amazon, who had started trading as an online bookstore in 1995, were by then claiming to be ‘the largest bookstore in the world’ and began to demand rising discounts from publishers. The golden age seemed to be coming to an end.

Just two years later, The Gruffalo’s publication seems to herald a new kind of business model, in which Penguin Random House Children’s Division can say that ‘we’re not just a publisher, we’re a brand owner’ and a creator of ‘tomorrow’s brands today’. In which new acquisitions depend on a 360º, transmedia approach that asks whether a character or narrative can also work as (more monetizable) films, theatre shows, toys, games or apps. Macmillan were at the forefront of this and by 2013 had even set up the fully integrated Gruffalo website: ‘an online home for all aspects of the Gruffalo brand, including books, merchandise, animations and theatre’ to ‘further engage the Gruffalo’s online community’. Admittedly, my son’s name might be a factor, but Gruff has been given The Gruffalo as a board book, The Gruffalo Sound Book, The Gruffalo Sticker Book, My First Gruffalo: Touch-and-Feel, a Gruffalo jigsaw, a Gruffalo pillow and duvet set, a Gruffalo moneybox, Gruffalo snap cards. Last Christmas, we went to see The Gruffalo at the theatre. In 2009, 9.8 million other people sat down on Christmas Day to watch The Gruffalo, many likely clutching a new soft toy Owl, Snake, Mouse, Fox or (rounder, cuddlier) Gruffalo.

In many ways this is the only sensible direction for publishers. As print struggles, more are reinventing themselves as ‘transmedia’ organizations that also run creative writing courses, put on events, sell postcards and diaries and mugs. It is only fitting that the publishers of children’s picture books, as in every great leap in publishing since they began, are at the forefront, continuing the tradition of franchising begun by creators such as Potter, Blyton and Bruna. Still, it can be a little disheartening for booklovers like myself to see shelves in bookshops given up to stuffed Elmers and Moomins. While books open up worlds, these toys seem to exist with the Octonauts amongst the realms of the too specific. A child could project so many things upon a generic toy rabbit, but a Peter Rabbit is always naughty and hopping away from Mr McGregor. He is unlikely to become, as the velveteen rabbit did, ‘real’.

Scheffler and Donaldson’s genius is to produce books together of such craft and quality that parents don’t resent having to experience it over and over (and over) across numerous media. The repetitions of a story, now loosened from reliance on an adult’s patience, can be infinite, and every one of their books is – in itself – full of structural repetitions and echoes. But perhaps our grown-up obsession with newness is mistaken anyway. If my father always retained a childlike quality, it was because if he liked something he never got bored with it. Those who enjoy rereading children’s books as an adult are defended marvellously by C. S. Lewis in his essay ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’ (1952): ‘I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, now I have two.’ Elsewhere, G. K. Chesterton observes:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.

Since The Gruffalo Donaldson and Scheffler have collaborated on Monkey Puzzle (2000), Room on the Broom (2001), The Smartest Giant in Town (2002), The Snail and the Whale (2003), The Gruffalo’s Child (2004), Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book (2005), Tiddler (2007), Stick Man (2008), Tabby McTat (2009), Zog (2010), The Highway Rat (2011), Superworm (2012), The Scarecrows’ Wedding (2014), Zog and the Flying Doctors (2016) and The Ugly Five (2017). All have their charms. So many parents hymn Donaldson’s skill with metre – how enjoyably and easily her poems gallop along; how after a few bedtimes you realize you have memorized them. As a poet, The Highway Rat is a high point for reading aloud, based on Alfred Noyes’ 1906 popular poem ‘The Highwayman’, with its hypnotic hexameters and repetitions. I also still enjoy Room on the Broom, though it has been responsible for me squatting awkwardly over our broom on the kitchen tiles for long mornings, inviting my woofing/tweeting children to clamber on, then tapping it three times. On the other hand, The Snail and the Whale perhaps showcases Scheffler’s artwork most impressively, as the pair travel the world. His pages are always rich beyond necessity with a naturalist’s careful details: barnacles, acorns, stalactites, a cormorant, a heron, a flying fish, a flash of deer behind a tree, toadstools, cornflowers, toucans, a bat in the cave’s corner.

Ask my daughter Cate which is her favourite, though, and the answer is unequivocal: Stick Man.

There is, of course, another story behind this story.

Julia Donaldson and her husband Malcolm had an eldest son, Hamish, who lived ‘in his imagination’. At first Julia found this enchanting, entering into his fantasy world. He would call one of their closets an ‘elevator’, emerging as a different character each time he clambered into it. His reflection in the mirror became an imaginary friend called Sammy. Julia has said: ‘I sometimes wonder if I entered into it too much with Hamish … But I think Hamish was wired differently from the start.’ Soon, she noticed with growing discomfort that: ‘Hamish seemed to think it was all real. And when he realized it wasn’t, he lost interest. He didn’t want to pretend. And he didn’t want to play with Lego if all it was was Lego.’

At five he was expelled from school. Over the years they tried everything ‘from psychologists to star charts’ but his behaviour only became more difficult to handle, the secondary school frequently suspending him for six weeks at a time when the family could barely cope with a few hours. By sixteen he had begun to hallucinate. He talked in rhyme. He smashed the window in his room believing it was animated by malign motives.

It was reportedly one of the most severe cases of psychosis the psychiatrists had ever seen. Hamish was suffering from schizoaffective disorder. For the rest of his life he lurched from crisis to crisis, frequently hospitalized, even briefly imprisoned, with his family never knowing what he’d do next; what the phone ringing might mean. In 2003, aged twenty-five, he stepped out in front of a train. On Desert Island Discs Donaldson said it was ‘an almost unselfish thing’.

Donaldson has also spoken of how soon afterwards, just before Christmas, Axel sent her a picture of the Gruffalo holding a candle, with the message ‘A little light in the darkness’. Working on books with him was one of the ways she endured her grief. The loss is clearly present in some of the titles that come after this. Tiddler (2007) is the story of a young fish losing his way. Until I read Donaldson’s interviews about Hamish I always wondered why Tiddler’s lies about why he’s late for school (treasure chests, mermaids, etc.) are not punished but celebrated, and in fact help him to find his way back when he gets caught in a net and cast out in the middle of the ocean. But they are not lies at all. They are delusions. In this fantasy, the child’s difference and imagination lead him into dark, alien waters, but also, somehow, with the help of the community, bring him home (and back, even, to Julia Donaldson herself, the ‘writer-friend’ who appears submerged under the waters in the last page).

The loss also permeates Stick Man, which I think time will prove Donaldson and Scheffler’s masterpiece. Stick Man is an animate stick, a husband and father to two children, his family somehow uniquely conscious when all other sticks are not. He goes out for a walk and is picked up by a dog. A series of incidents follows during which he finds himself carried further and further away from home. It becomes a kind of nursery version of The Odyssey, as Stick Man tries, in the face of innumerable obstacles, to get back to his family. Donaldson has said it came out of the keenness of her grieving at Christmas, and that sense that ‘there’s someone missing from the dinner table’. It was partly inspired by Axel Scheffler’s drawing of The Gruffalo’s Child clutching a little stick doll, but also by memories of Hamish playing with sticks during a period they lived in France – not having packed many toys, he made cardboard or twigs transform into ‘ice creams or violins’.

This, then, is one of his toys brought back to life. In turn, thousands of sticks every day now are reanimated by his imagination, as little girls and boys charge through the woods with their parents, picking up ones with ‘arms’. Nunhead Cemetery swarms with disorientated sticks that my daughter must help. ‘Family tree, where ARE YOOOOOU?’ she demands.

But the way Stick Man is mistreated by the people whom he encounters becomes increasingly upsetting as the story progresses. They use him as a sandcastle’s mast, a knight’s sword, a Pooh-stick – but they don’t hear his voice; don’t acknowledge his reality. ‘I’M STICK MAN,’ he protests, with increasing pathos, insisting on his humanity. Can nobody see what he sees? Is a return to the family tree just a hopeless dream? Donaldson has joked about how some people consider him an ‘existential hero like something out of Sartre’, but Stick Man might also make us think of someone with mental health issues, ignored and passed around by the system. Whose is the voice, warning him to beware of the snow? Is it the adult reading the book, the child listening (and maybe joining in to say the rhyme ‘snow’)? Is it the writer’s own voice? Whoever warns, they are horribly impotent; never able to change his fate.

Yet the story ends with a Christmas miracle. This is not The Snowman. Donaldson has said: ‘I am not keen on those old fairy tales where children end up being boiled in a pot by a troll. Children need hope and a belief you can overcome difficulties.’ Stick Man falls unconscious in the snow by the side of the road, skinny and yellow-eyed. A carol singer puts him in the grate. Then in the night, before the fire is lit, he hears something in the chimney: a ‘stuck’ man. In selflessly struggling to free him, Stick Man also saves himself.

It is Santa Claus who is stuck, and once freed he asks Stick Man to help him deliver presents to boys and girls (the same ones, perhaps, who used him so cruelly earlier on). And then we cut to the family tree, so beautifully imagined by Scheffler – the pencilled ‘stick’ figures on the walls, the acorn pull-along toy, the silver birch bed with its blanket of leaves. The window they stared hopefully from all year that feels like a tear; a painful wound. The small, sad faces of the children as their mother tucks them in. It doesn’t feel like Christmas ‘without their Stick Dad’.

Only then there is a sudden sound above them.

Someone is tumbling into their house.

Is it a bird, or a bat, or a mouse?

Or could it … yes, could it just possibly be …

It is always happy endings that make me cry the most, my voice turning shrill and broken as I read them – especially happy endings where the characters are back where they began. How to explain this to a child?

Darling, it’s because all they want is what they had; to repeat it over.