For the third day of Christmas, I want to talk about one of my favorite Christmas books: The Box of Delights by John Masefield. I was actually introduced to the story through the BBC TV adaptation, which aired on PBS, on the sadly-missed Wonderworks series, which aired in December of 1984. As a young Doctor Who fan, I was excited to see that the part of Cole Hawlings was played by former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton. The show was great, and I was pleased to rediscover it a number of years ago. I was even more pleased to discover it is available in its entirety on YouTube. Since the book isn’t heavily illustrated, I’ll share the episodes of the series here to break up the text a bit.
(Spoilers after the jump. Spoilers from a book written in 1935, so sorry if that’s upsetting.)
About eight years ago, I wrote this about it in an older blog entry of mine:
It's this weird, modern (for it's time; published in 1935) fantasy story that moshes up modern-day religion, pagan religion, talking animals, Roman armies, Herne the Hunter, magic, gangsters, Punch and Judy, flying cars, time travel, and Christmas. The (extremely) simple version of the story is that young Kay Harker finds himself caught up in a plot by evil gangsters/magicians to get hold of the Box of Delights. The Box (held by centuries-old philosopher-turned-Punch & Judy man Cole Hawlings) has the power to make people "go swift," "go small," or travel through time.
That simple description doesn't really do it justice, though. It doesn't take into account the nonsensical digressions and plot twists that come from out of left field and disappear just as quickly. At one point, while Kay and his friends are hiding from the gangsters, using the box to shrink themselves, they encounter a race of fairies who have been transformed into paintings, with no real explanation. When Kay frees them, they reward him by allowing him to visit their realm one day a year.
And then the kids leave, and the incident is never brought up again.
I hadn’t actually reread the book for a few years, until this year, and while I remembered most of the broad strokes of the plot, I had forgotten a lot of the details. It really is a complicated, twisty fantasy, demanding a certain amount of attention from the reader. But it’s not so complex it is confusing or impenetrable. It’s just a really well-written children’s fantasy, in a way that doesn’t feel calculated or written down.
Most of my thoughts on the book and the TV show can be found in that earlier blog entry (although the links to other articles appear to be all dead), but this year, I found myself with a couple of new insights. For one, I no longer think of the apparent digressions as odd digressions, and more telling the story the way a child would tell it. Kay and his friends having an essentially self-contained adventure rescuing a fairy royal family in the middle of the story simply echoes the free-ranging imagination of a young storyteller. Of course, Kay and his friends forget about everything else during a Christmas party, because what child wouldn’t do exactly that?
My other thought is that while this book treats Christmas as a Christian holiday, with a plot to stop the holiday from being celebrated at the region’s cathedral by kidnapping the bishop and all the other priests, deans, and other church staff, it also is very connected to the holiday’s pagan roots. Herne the Hunter plays one of the major roles, as do Roman culture and mythology. In a subtle way, this book is much more connected to the true roots of Christmas in ancient solstice celebrations than it is Christian traditions.
I still hate the last couple of paragraphs of the book, which I’ve read were insisted upon by Masefield’s wife. But I choose to discount them, and take the rest of the story for what it is: one of the greatest children’s fantasies every written, and one of the finest Christmas stories ever.
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