tion>
As well as being a number one bestselling writer for adults, Matt Haig has won the Blue Peter Book Award, the Smarties Book Prize and been nominated three times for the Carnegie Medal for his stories for children and young adults. The idea for the Christmas series came when his son asked what Father Christmas was like as a boy.
Chris Mould went to art school at the age of sixteen. He has won the Nottingham Children's Book Award and been commended by the Sheffield Children's Book Award. He loves his work and likes to write and draw the kind of books that he would have liked to have had on his shelf as a boy. He is married with two children and likes in Yorkshire.
Also by Matt Haig
Father Christmas and Me
A Boy Called Christmas
Echo Boy
To Be A Cat
The Runaway Troll
Shadow Forest
Published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Matt Haig, 2016
Illustrations © Chris Mould, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 857 2
eISBN 978 1 78211 858 9
Typeset in 13.25/15pt Bembo by
Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Contents
Her mother’s hand (quite a short but very sad chapter)
Father Vodol and his long words
Running
Officer Pry
Charles Dickens
The dark sky
The falling reindeer
The soap
The Truth Pixie
A woman called Mary
Four cheers for Father Christmas!
The new sleigh
The bite
A crash landing
A royal guest
Dasher to the rescue!
The royal seal of approval
The girl with a beard
Father Christmas makes a decision
Walking among humans
The cat
48 Doughty Street
The night inspector
A ghostly place
Something magic
The girl downstairs
Unhappy Christmas
Mr Creeper’s shoelaces
Child on the loose!
Amelia’s last dash
Father Christmas’s escape
Reindeer to the rescue
The return of Captain Soot
Mr Creeper’s fingers
News from Father Vodol
Amelia gets angry
The Troll Valley
Inside the troll’s fist
A Christmas dinner
The cracking cave
Drimwickery
Footprints in the snow
Home
The girl who saved Christmas
The kind of magic that gets reindeer to fly in the sky? The kind that helps Father Christmas travel around the world in a single night? The kind that can stop time and make dreams come true?
Hope.
That’s how.
Without hope, there would be no magic.
It isn’t Father Christmas or Blitzen or any of the other reindeer that make magic happen on the night before Christmas.
It’s every child who wants and wishes for it to happen. If no one wished for magic to happen there would be no magic. And because we know Father Christmas comes every year we know now that magic – at least some kind of magic –