Lilian Gask

The Fairies and the Christmas Child Lilian Gask

The Fairies and the Christmas Child (1912), by Lilian Gask, is an endearing and unjustly obscure work of fiction with some great Victorian fairy stories."I tried to be glad that I was a Christmas child. But I wasn't really until a long time afterward, when I had found the Fairy Ring, and met the Queen of the Fairies."If you are a Christmas Child, you don't get birthday presents, but only Christmas ones. On the other hand, you can see and talk to the fairies. This is the case of a boy born on Christmas Day and named Chris. Chris runs away from home after his father forgets both Christmas and his birthday. The boy finds himself in a park, where he meets the fairy-queen, who tells him that all children born on December 25 have the gift of talking to the fairy-folk. During their conversations, the fairies tell him delightful tales of shape-shifting princesses, doomed supernatural lovers and peasants rewarded for kindness or punished for laziness or cruelty. Some with happy endings and some with sad, some with good creatures, and some with bad. The author put many modern folklorists to shame with the depth of her knowledge on the fairyland and its inhabitants. It's all quite accurate to the original myths and folklore, except of course, for the single detail about children born on Christmas day being favored by fairies. However, the readers must be aware that The Fairies and the Christmas Child isn't a Christmas novel at all. In fact, Christmas isn't relevant after the boy encounters the fairies.