A Visit from St. Nicholas" (also known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas", 1823) attributed to Clement Clarke Moore Tis the night before Christmas and Herne the Hunter and the Lady of the Ring and the King & Queen of Fairies will all come a'calling! It seems that many other reviewers had not read 'The Midnight Folk' first, yet jumped into this, its sequel. They seemed confused, and seem to think that it is because they are reading a sequel.

It's mentioned many many times that several Rats really hate Kay. They say over and over that Kay "should have his head chopped off, because he is going to get a Dog for Christmas." And I kept waiting for that famous Dog to make an appearance. Why is so important that Kay is going to get a Dog for Christmas? How will this affect our plot? Why are the Rats so upset over this? And why is it always "Dog" with a capital D, and not just "dog"? What is so amazingly special about this Dog? Caught up in a battle between two powerful magicians, Kay fights to save not just the people he loves but also the future of Christmas itself. Masefield has a way with a well-turned, memorable sentence: "And now, Master Harker, now that the Wolves are Running, perhaps you could do something to stop their Bite?"As an ending, that is; the book itself has plenty of faults along the way. It is a grab bag of early 20th century children’s book tropes, and some just don’t quite work, not at this remove. But some very much do, particularly the snowy, wintry, Christmassy bits. The fact that Peter got 'scrobbled' (one of my favourite bits of this book actually was the delightful use of the word 'scrobbled'!), and the last that is heard of him is when Abner is talking to him through his cell! How can people have missed this? How can the writer have missed this? Seriously? Dreamy and poetic … those descriptions are rather important in The Box of Delights. The novel was first published in 1935, and the author, John Masefield, was poet laureate from 1930 until he died in 1967. His prose trips along like a hallucinogenic daydream at times, especially when Kay takes advantage of the box's powers – he can use it to go swift, to go small, and to fall into the past, where he meets a succession of characters including Herne the Hunter of English folklore. What a difference a few decades (and the full text) make! I’m so glad I’ve returned to this amazing story. I see it as a bridge between George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis, bringing in elements of almost every story before and after it. It is a continuous story, but it’s also a series of episodes that sometimes veer into the bizarre. For example, most of the town is “scrobbled” by a gang, and no one, including the police, seems to care very much, even about small children being whisked away for days at a time. Kay seems to have total freedom to do anything he likes, which sometimes involves adventures that could be extremely perilous. For me, though, all of this works together in a dreamy story that invites all kinds of symbolic interpretation but will never reveal whether any particular interpretation is intended. I wouldn’t want it to make any more logical sense than it does—though I see that this mysterious, mystical aspect of it was surely too much for my elementary-school understanding. I only wish I’d rediscovered it in time to read it to my kids. We would have had a grand time laughing and puzzling through it together. Describing Masefield’s work as “magnificent”, he said: “It warrants a revival. The RSC putting on the play is a great thing … a wonderful Christmas story.”

The current owner of the box is an old Punch and Judy man called Cole Hawlings whom Harker meets at the railway station. They develop an instant rapport, which leads Hawlings to confide that he is being chased by a magician called Abner Brown and his gang, which includes Harker's former governess. For safety, Hawlings (who turns out to be the medieval philosopher and alleged magician Ramon Llull) entrusts the box to Harker. The schoolboy then goes on to have many adventures as he protects the box from those who wish to use it for bad deeds. Our festive offering in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre this winter,Piers Torday’s magical reimagining of John Masefield’s much-loved festive children’s 1935 classic The Box of Delights will run from Tuesday 31 October 2023 until Sunday 7 January 2024.

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And Christmas, after all, is just a dream. We spend twenty-four days planning, organising, imagining the perfect day and wake up on the 25th to discover it’s nothing like our vision. What matters, really, is not the day, but the dream that precedes it. The vision of Christmas defines the season. The Box of Delights is the vision of a children’s adventure book, full of fantastical feats and strange magics before revealing them to be airy nothings. So far, so fairly traditional children's fantasy. But its Christmas setting in a snowbound corner of England (with particular resonances for this very festive season - all the grown-ups conspire to be snowed in elsewhere, leaving the children pretty much alone to enjoy their travails) and the dreamy, poetic language of author John Masefield come together to make it something of a seasonal classic that certainly bears repeat readings year after year. So the children are all outside, playing in the snow, making a lopsided snowman, when the adults call for them to come in. "You'll catch your death of cold, come inside!" The girls grumble, but go inside to put on dry clothes, and have a hot cocoa, and sit by the toasty fire. The boys say, "Too many rules around here, let's go exploring." and they run off to have adventures in the snow for hours and hours.

With The Box of Delights we pretty much reached the peak of televised adaptations of classic children’s books. At the time it was the BBC’s most expensive children’s drama ever, with groundbreaking (for TV) special effects and a lot of snow. The Box of Delights is a children’s fantasy novel about a boy, Kay, returning from boarding school who finds himself mixed up in a battle to possess a magical box. It allows the owner to shrink in size, to fly swiftly, to go into the past and to experience the magical wonders contained within the box. To be fair to the BBC, there was an audience for this stuff. I was a well-mannered bourgeois prep-school boy and I had grown up reading these books: Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit, Richmal Crompton and A. A. Milne. As children we didn’t understand that these things might be out of date or jar with contemporary mores. These were the kind of stories we were given, so these were the kind of stories we wanted. Can there be a more Christmassy book, this side of old Ebenezer's adventures with his trio of spirits, than The Box of Delights by John Masefield?

The Box of Delights

If you cannot open a .mobi file on your mobile device, please use .epub with an appropriate eReader. a b Kingsley, Madeleine (17 November 1984), "A Box Full of Magic", Radio Times, pp.101–103 , retrieved 14 October 2017 Tis the night before Christmas and little Kay shall become as small and as fast as a bird! and he shall encounter wolves & wizards & witches & thieves! and he shall visit strange places and he shall enter the past and he shall protect his precious Box of Delights and he shall visit a friendly mouse! and he will deal with all of this with a certain nonchalance because it's not like he hasn't done this sort of thing before! Piers Torday (30 November 2017). "Long before Harry Potter, The Box of Delights remade children's fantasy". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2018. And it NEVER happens. Kay doesn't get a dog on Christmas morning, because the book ends at Christmas Eve midnight. What was the point of that whole charade?!?