A while back I went through the entirety of Enid Blyton’s Holiday Stories – a 2015 Hodder collection, and both reviewed the story choices and checked them for updates to the text. My initial idea had actually been to do that with Christmas Stories, having just read it to Brodie at bedtimes in December. But it was too late for 2022, and too early for 2023, so I did Holiday Stories first.

There are 25 stories in this collection (there were 26 in Holiday Stories) but as 11 of them all come from The Christmas Book, my pile of books wasn’t quite so big this time around. Hopefully that will also make things a bit quicker as I won’t have to mess around with identifying so many different illustrators and publishing dates.

Christmas Stories Content

A Family Christmas Part One: Christmas Holidays – The Christmas Book

The Lost Presents – Enid Blyton’s Snowdrop Story Book – I don’t have this. I’ve a few of the flower story books but the others are really hard to find!

Santa Claus Gets a Shock – Enid Blyton’s Happy Story Book

A Family Christmas Part Two: Bringing Home the Holly – The Christmas Book

A Week Before Christmas – Enid Blyton’s Treasury (despite it not appearing in the photo, because I managed to miss pulling it off the shelf, I do actually have this.)

A Family Christmas Part Three: The Curious Mistletoe – The Christmas Book

The Christmas Tree Aeroplane –The Second Holiday Book

A Family Christmas Part Four: Balder the Bright and Beautiful – The Christmas Book

A Hole in Santa’s Sack – The Magic Knitting Needles and Other Stories

A Family Christmas Part Five: The Christmas Tree – The Christmas Book

The Tiny Christmas Tree – Tales After Supper

A Family Christmas Part Six: A Christmassy Afternoon – The Christmas Book

What Happened on Christmas Eve – The Eighth Holiday Book

A Family Christmas Part Seven: Bringing in the Yule Log – The Christmas Book

The Little Reindeer Bell – Enid Blyton’s Magazine No. 24 Vol. 4 – There are only four magazines I don’t have (out of 162) and this unfortunately is one of them.

A Family Christmas Part Eight: Christmas Carols – The Christmas Book

The Very Full Stocking – Jolly Tales – this is in a few different printings of Jolly Tales, none of which I have. I can’t find any copies for sale either, only the earlier Little Book No 3, Jolly Tales, which doesn’t contain this story.

In Santa Claus’s Castle – Enid Blyton’s Omnibus

A Family Christmas Part Nine: A Visitor in the Night – The Christmas Book

What They Did at Miss Brown’s School – Enid Blyton’s Book of the Year

The Christmas Tree Party – Tricky the Goblin and Other Stories

A Family Christmas Part Ten: The Story of Santa Claus – The Christmas Book

Santa Claus Gets Busy – Enid Blyton’s Bright Story Book

A Family Christmas Part Eleven: Christmas Day – The Christmas Book

The Christmas Tree Fairy – The Enid Blyton Holiday Book 

I have already written a lot of posts about Blyton’s Christmas content – including a (brief) review of The Christmas Book so I probably won’t repeat too much of all that, and can focus on the updates instead.

A Family Christmas Part One: Christmas Holidays

Susan and Benny arrive home from boarding school, and along with Ann and Peter talk about their plans for Christmas and how wonderful that time of year is. They mention how many customs they follow, and start to wonder how they came about. Mother doesn’t know, and when Father comes home he tells them he’ll answer their questions tomorrow.

Being the first story in both books, I will make some points here that will apply to the rest of the Family Christmas chapters.

The first is that A Family Christmas is a new title, given presumably to make it clear that all these chapters are part of the same story. The first chapter of The Christmas Book is just titled Christmas Holidays.

It begins with a quote from Walter Scott (though it’s not stated it is from canto 6 – Old Christmastide – from the longer poem Marmion.)

Heap on more wood – the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will
We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.

But this (and the quote that begins each subsequent chapter) are omitted from the new version. Perhaps they thought that modern children wouldn’t know (or wouldn’t care) who the authors were?

In a promising start the children’s names are unchanged.

A few minor changes are made, updating stocking (the regular, every day foot-covering, not the kind put out for Santa to fill) to sock, and hols to holidays. When reading hols in the Famous Five I did have to explain to Brodie it was short for holidays, he perhaps thought I was saying halls. The quaint made holiday becomes made a holiday, boarding-school loses its hyphen, and one use of italics is removed (but all the rest remain).

So far so good – but there’s always something to spoil it.

In the original text Mother is always Mother. The children call her mother, the text refers to Mother or his/her/their mother. Nice and consistent.

The new text retains many uses of mother, but the children now go back and forth between calling her Mummy and Mother, with one use of Mum as well. Where the text used Mother as a name this is sometimes changed to his or their mother.

It makes no sense. I could understand if the younger children called her Mummy and the older ones Mother, but they all chop and change at random. Did they feel like the word Mother was overused and so had to swap it out? If I feel like there’s a decent justification for a change I don’t mind so much, but this sort of inconsistent changing of words/names really irritates me.

And now for a rare case of changes I kind of approve of! I’ve already mentioned in my review of The Christmas Book that it annoys me that Mother can’t ever answer any of the questions and passes them all to Daddy. What’s worse is her repeated comments about him being cleverer than she is, which I’m actually glad have been cut.

I begin to think I am not all that clever.

He is cleverer than I am.

I feel so stupid.

I’m sure all parents have moments where their children ask them things they can’t answer – I know Brodie regularly stumps me! But we can’t know everything – it doesn’t make us stupid. Obviously at the time Blyton was writing it wasn’t quite so easy to just look stuff up – I can quickly Google information and read it out, or find videos to explain how things work. But I bet the family at least had a set of Encyclopaedias which may have given them information about some of the customs.

On an individual level there’s nothing wrong with Mother not knowing certain things, and Daddy knowing them. I just think it’s a shame that Blyton chose to reinforce the stereotype of the housewife/mother who’s not expected or encouraged to use her brains,  while married to the clever, hard-working father when we know she’s capable of writing intelligent and resourceful girls and women. So it’s not a bad thing that the new edition has chosen to remove those references – especially as there’s no response to them (for example nobody tells her she’s not stupid as she knows loads about another subject).

Feminist rant over, if I remember correctly the rest of the book isn’t so bad, though Daddy does answer all the questions.

Lastly – of course the new edition is not illustrated, so we lose the lovely drawings of Treyer Evans.