This was a nice collection to read mid-December, it definitely helped me to get into the Christmas spirit. It made me realise that I might actually enjoy reading Dickens now. I’d sworn off him after trying to read a book years ago, but now I think I was just too young to properly get it. It also introduced Trollope and Wodehouse’s writing to me, and I’m definitely interested in reading more from them both. 

I don’t really enjoy poetry in general, and most in here were take it or leave it for me, but I did really enjoy Stevenson’s ‘Christmas at Sea’ – it really did something to me. 

However, the way the collection was put together had a LOT of flaws, which definitely impacted my enjoyment. 

On a positive note, I did enjoy the order some of the entries were in, with either specific themes linking them together, or newer work referencing the older work that had preceded it. I also appreciated that the ‘Christmas at War’ section was not only about the World Wars.  

Now to the negatives. One of the biggest was that the for the majority of the entries the publication date wasn’t included. This meant I really struggled to understand a lot of them, as era is such an important piece of context, especially with such short pieces of work. I ended up having to look most dates up online, because the experience wasn’t good without them. I don’t understand why they didn’t think to include them, especially in a collection that spans such a wide timeframe.   

Additionally, some of the excerpts from novels were hard to understand without the wider context of the novel, the worst of which was Emma. The excerpt made ZERO sense to me, as it was exclusively characters nattering about other characters with absolutely no context. And to top it off, it was barely even on theme – it was the characters travelling in a carriage in the snow, but the actual weather/season was barely mentioned. 

I also didn’t like the Nativity section at all, but that is more a personal preference. 

But the thing that stood out to me most while reading was the lack of diversity in the stories and authors. The ONLY non-white author (Benjamin Zephaniah) was the most recent work published, and it honestly felt like a token diversity entry, rather than the editors wanting to include it. Non-white people have been writing just as long as white people have, so surely they could have found at LEAST one other work from a similar time period as the rest of the entries to include as well? The work also had a completely different tone to the rest of the entries, which felt pretty jarring. Everything else was ‘poncy white people tone’, and Zephaniah’s was completely the opposite. If there were more entries from people of colour, this wouldn’t have been as much of an issue to me, but the fact that the only non-white author’s work was so unlike all the rest made me feel they just picked Zephaniah’s work because he’s a well-known poet and wanted the diversity points, rather than cared about the context of the collection. We can do better than this people! 

So, overall this was definitely a mixed bag. I do intend to keep the collection, but will be more selective about which works I re-read.