Tolkien, J.R.R. The Father Christmas Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
Pure magic. I loved every minute of this book! I have always loved J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination. From The Hobbit to The Two Towers I have always enjoyed submerging myself in his work. This book is something special. I think Nancy Pearl sums it up best in Book Lust “Tolkien wrote these letters for his children, beginning in 1920 and ending in 1939. Whimsical pictures complement the descriptions of Father Christmas’s life at the North Pole” (p 56). But, what Pearl doesn’t tell you is that Tolkien is posing as Father Christmas, and each letter (one for each year) is a continuation a story (involving a polar bear, elves and ) from the year before. The illustrations that accompany the letters are as captivating as the storyline. I can truly imagine being a child, caught up in waiting for the letter from Father Christmas.
The sobering thing about this book is that it ends the same year that World War II starts. Tolkien even makes mention of it on the last page “Half the world seems in the wrong place.” It seems like everyone needed to put aside childhood in 1939.
BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Christmas Books For The Whole Family To Read” (p 55).
~*LunaSea*~ 