The tradition of Christmas tales, made popular in the 19th century by Charles Dickens, is based on the theme of redemption. Misanthropy, isolation and self-pity must be replaced by self-knowledge, generosity, communion and compassion – usually as a result of some pivotal encounter in which innocence thaws bitterness and cynicism.
It’s a theme that runs from A Christmas Carol through It’s a Wonderful Life, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street, all the way to Frozen. Even if the religious message isn’t overt, there’s often a strongly Christian-flavoured strand of magic at work: in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Witch’s curse over Narnia decrees that it be “always winter, but never Christmas”.
But as with the festival itself, in some of the greatest Christmas classics there’s a current of darker, older beliefs underlying the cosy festive traditions: a harking back to the winter solstice, the turning of the year, with all its implications of the darkest day and the return of the light.
So it’s a joy for those of us who like a bit of pagan magic with our mince pies to see two examples enjoying a revival, on stage and through the power of social media.
John Masefield’s 1935 novel The Box of Delights perfectly captures this tension between the civilised rituals of Christmas and the wilder, pagan forces beneath that threaten to overturn it, like the Green Knight bursting into King Arthur’s Christmas feast. The central plot revolves around the wizard Abner Brown attempting to prevent the thousandth Christmas service at Tatchester cathedral; clergymen and bishops are kidnapped, and representatives of the church shown as helpless against a more potent, ancient magic.
Masefield, who wrote only two stories for children – The Box of Delights is a sequel to The Midnight Folk – was a direct influence on JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, yet the books are far less familiar to children now. Like many people of my generation, I discovered The Box of Delights through the 1984 BBC adaptation; at the age of 10, I found a frisson in its references to pagan folklore, Arthurian legend and medieval philosophy that I had not encountered in more sanitised children’s stories. It nourished my lifelong fascination with Renaissance occultism.
The author Piers Torday had been similarly obsessed with the story as a child. He wanted to stage an adaptation while at university with two friends who shared his passion for it, but the rights were not available, and the project was forgotten. Twenty-five years on, the stars aligned: the same friends were now a theatre executive and a producer, and Torday’s new adaptation of The Box of Delights has just opened at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London.
The book’s appeal, he says, lies in the combination of “classic English Christmas fantasy” – carol singers, food markets with plum puddings, cathedral choirs – with “the long shadows of pagan tradition” that still haunt our midwinter feast.
Susan Cooper’s 1973 novel The Dark is Rising is clearly influenced by Masefield. She too draws on Arthurian legend and English folklore (the character of Herne the Hunter appears in both), as it intrudes into the cosy domestic rituals of the young hero, Will Stanton, who goes to bed on midwinter eve, the night before his 11th birthday, and wakes to find himself a central figure in an ancient battle between light and dark.
When the nature writer Robert Macfarlane, for whom it was a formative childhood book, tweeted about it recently he was amazed to receive thousands of responses from all over the world from impassioned readers who return to it every Christmas. The result is a Twitter reading group (#TheDarkisReading) set to begin, like the novel, on 20 December; over 1,300 people have said they want to take part.
The Dark is Rising is a disturbing book, in a way that children’s stories rarely are now. At the beginning, Cooper describes Will’s fear of the dark in a way that makes the hairs stand up on your arms; she draws out echoes of the old powers of the English landscape – now hostile, now beguiling – in a way that recalls the Gawain poet.
“It feels ever more relevant in a time when the dark really does seem to be rising,” Macfarlane says. For anyone weary of the cheap sentiment and tinselly glitz of so many Christmas offerings, and wanting a taste of deep midwinter mystery, these novels are the best place to start, and these new ways of sharing them are part of the magic.
• Stephanie Merritt writes as SJ Parris. Her most recent book is Conspiracy
