A Boy Called Christmas
Series: A Boy Called Christmas, Book 1
By: Matt Haig / Narrated By: Stephen Fry
Length: 4 hrs and 25 mins
A good old-fashioned fairy tale of a story!
A Boy Called Christmas starts as many fairy tales do. We’re deep in the woods, father is a woodcutter, and mother is long dead, drowned in the well after running from a bear attack. Little Nicholas is happy with his pa and with his mouse friend, Mika. He terribly misses his mother, and poverty is no fun, but he loves what he has, namely the only two gifts he’s ever received in his life: a sleigh, and a little doll fashioned from an old turnip.
Things begin going awry when a stranger, a hunter, appears and starts talking to papa Joel, the woodcutter, about joining a band of other men as they trek North. No man has ever been to the North and returned to tell the tale, but there’s a lot of money at stake, and Joel is dazzled by the possibilities such money could provide for him and Nicholas.
But he’ll have to leave Nicholas. For months. In the care of his sister Carlotta, Nicholas’s most disliked aunt. So we have a Wicked Aunt thing going also, as she does reprehensible and cruel things to Nicholas—makes him sleep outside, has him go hungry even as she eats all that Nicholas gathers for food, banishes Mika from the household, and plays a very, very cruel joke on Nicholas that causes him anguish and physical pain.
Nicholas has had enough and leaves with Mika to find Joel. And that’s where the story picks up and turns into an adventure of sorts, as the two of them struggle against the elements, befriend a wounded reindeer soon dubbed Blitzen, and find proof of elves up North.
The elves that Nicholas finds are a sorry and dispirited lot, held quiet by laws, and rules, and regulations. There is no joy in the town, and Nicholas is soon imprisoned with a Truth Pixie and a troll. When things seem most dire, he discovers that if you wish really hard enough, think good thoughts, if you’ve been magicked by an elf, impossible things can truly happen (and the word “impossible” is a very bad word to elves).
After the adventure, where Nicholas is forced to choose between his father and doing what’s right, between himself and the rest of mankind, A Boy Called Christmas becomes a series of explanations about how different facets of what we know of Christmas and what we know of Santa Claus came to be. At that point, the story begins to drag a bit because it takes Nicholas DECADES to figure out who he is and what he wants to be in the world. Still, I truly did enjoy Blitzen, and Santa’s red cap, and how Santa came to be so round (gingerbread, my friend; plenty of gingerbread).
Stephen Fry does an excellent job with the narration. It could’ve been rather tricky with elves, and mice, and trolls, and wicked aunts, and hunters, and alllllll the characters that are in the audiobook, but he manages them all quite well and quite properly.
If you’ve some extra time and are in the mood for how the Santa myth came to be, look no further than A Boy Called Christmas. It’s a really pleasant story and has truly good narration. A fine little listen indeed!
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