The Longest Night
A quiet bedtime story about the night before Christmas morning when everything is still and one child cannot sleep. About 6 minutes to read aloud.
A story for tonight, read aloud
Each one comes with a read-aloud time and the age it suits, so you can choose by how long you have as much as by taste.
Find a story by length and ageWhat is on this site
Stories to read tonight, and pages for whenever the questions start.
The Greencoat
A story about a figure in a green coat who walks through a village on Christmas Eve and leaves something behind at every door. About 7 minutes to read aloud.
The Pudding Problem
A funny story about a Christmas pudding that will not set and the increasingly unlikely attempts to fix it. About 2 minutes to read aloud.
What the Robin Saw
A gentle story told from a robin's view of Christmas morning in a garden, seeing things the family inside cannot. About 4 minutes to read aloud.
The Box of Stars
A story about a child who finds a wooden box in the attic that is older than anyone in the family can remember. About 6 minutes to read aloud.
The Last Cracker
A story about a family Christmas dinner where one cracker is left on the table and nobody wants to be the one to pull it. About 6 minutes to read aloud.
The tradition behind the stories
Where Father Christmas came from, how the customs took shape, and what to read if these pages leave you wanting more.
Who Father Christmas is
The figure behind the stories, and how he differs from the man in the red suit on American cards.
Read the page →Father Christmas and Santa Claus
Two figures got folded into one over a century of cards, adverts and films. Here is how that happened.
Read the page →Where the customs came from
Holly, the tree, the cracker, the pudding: each has a traceable history, and some of it predates Christmas itself.
Read the page →Midwinter before Christmas
The dark half of the year had its own customs long before the Church put a feast day on top of them.
Read the page →Other stories worth finding
Not everything worth reading aloud fits on this site. A short list of where to look next.
Read the page →For the person doing the reading
Two pages here are written for the adult holding the book. Reading aloud well is about the mechanics of doing it, how pace, pausing and the odd glance up from the page change what a story does in a room. When they ask if he is real takes on the question most parents meet sooner or later, and sets out several ways families have answered it without steering you toward one.
Neither page tells you what to think. The first is method, gathered from what actually happens when a story is spoken. The second exists because the question arrives at a different age for every child, asked in a different way, and there is no single script that fits all of them.
The rest of the site sits alongside these two. The stories are chosen by how long you have and how old the listener is, each one marked with its read-aloud time. The tradition pages set out where Father Christmas and the customs around him actually came from, as far as that is known. The grown-up pages are here because reading well and answering a hard question well both reward a little thought beforehand.