Father Christmas and Me. Matt Haig
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As well as being a number one bestselling writer for adults, Matt Haig has won the Blue Peter Book Award, the Smarties Book Prize and been nominated three times for the Carnegie Medal for his stories for children and young adults. The idea for the Christmas series came when his son asked what Father Christmas was like as a boy
Chris Mould went to art school at the age of sixteen. He has won the Nottingham Children's Book Award and been commended by the Sheffield Children's Book Award. He loves his work and likes to write and draw the kind of books that he would have liked to have had on his shelf as a boy. He is married with two children and lives in Yorkshire.
Also by Matt Haig
The Girl Who Saved Christmas
A Boy Called Christmas
Echo Boy
To Be A Cat
The Runaway Troll
Shadow Forest
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Matt Haig, 2017
Illustrations © Chris Mould, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 072 6
eISBN 978 1 78689 076 4
Typeset in Bembo by
Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
For Pearl, Lucas and Andrea
Contents
The bit after the book where you thank people
Somewhere Else
But the thing you probably don’t know about is me.
I will start by telling you the things that are easy to believe.
My name is Amelia Wishart and I have a black cat called Captain Soot. I was born in London, and I lived there until I was eleven years old. And then I lived somewhere else.
It is the somewhere else that you might find a bit unlikely.
I suppose I could tell you that I moved to Finland, and you would have no problem believing that, because Finland is on a map. And it is, technically, true. I did move to Finland, in the far far far North, beyond the bit of Finland known as Lapland. The somewhere else I lived was simply called the Far North and the town was Elfhelm. Now, Elfhelm isn’t on any maps. Not human ones, anyway. And the reason for this is that most people can’t see it. It’s invisible to them. You see, Elfhelm is a magical place, and to see magical places you have to believe in magic. And the type of humans who draw all the maps are the people least likely to believe in magic.
But Elfhelm is an ordinary town in lots of ways. A small town. An oversized village, really. And there are normal things there, like shops and houses and a town hall. There are streets and trees and even a bank.
But the people who live there are very different to me. And very different to you too.
They