JOURNEY TO THE EDGE OF MAGIC

Amelia Wishart was the first child ever to receive a Christmas present. It was her Christmas spirit that gave Santa the extra boost of magic he needed to make his first trip around the world.

But when her mother falls ill, Amelia is sent to the workhouse to toil under cruel Mr Creeper. Without a whiff of kindness to keep her going, her spirit begins to drain away.

Meanwhile, up at the North Pole, magic levels dip dangerously low as Christmas approaches, and Santa knows that something is gravely wrong. If he’s going to save Christmas, he might just need some help . . .

Chris Mould went to art school at the age of 16 and has been drawing ever since. He has produced work for theatre companies, film development, television and children’s books. He has won the Nottingham Children’s Book Award, the Swiss Prix Enfantaisie award and twice been shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. He lives in West Yorkshire with his family.

Matt Haig has written a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction. This includes the novels The Humans, How to Stop Time and The Midnight Library, several children's books and most recently the self-help book The Comfort Book.

@matthaig1 | @mattzhaig | matthaig.com

Do you know how magic works?

The kind of magic that gets reindeer to fly in the sky? The kind that helps Father Christmas travel around the world in a single night? The kind that can stop time and make dreams come true?

Hope.

That’s how.

Without hope, there would be no magic.

It isn’t Father Christmas or Blitzen or any of the other reindeer that make magic happen on the night before Christmas.

It’s every child who wants and wishes for it to happen. If no one wished for magic to happen, there would be no magic. And because we know Father Christmas comes every year, we know now that magic--at least some kind of magic--is real.

But this wasn’t always the case. There was once a time before stockings and Christmas mornings spent excitedly ripping off wrapping paper. It was quite a miserable time, when very few human children had any reason to believe in magic at all.

And so, the very first night that Father Christmas ever decided to give human children a reason to be happy and to believe in magic, he had a lot of work to do.

The toys were in his sack, the sleigh and reindeer were ready, but as he flew out of Elfhelm, he knew there wasn’t enough magic in the air. He traveled through the northern lights, but they were hardly glowing at all. And the reason for the low magic levels was that there wasn’t much hoping going on. After all, how does a child hope for magic to happen if they’ve never seen it?

So that very first visit from Father Christmas nearly didn’t come. And that it did happen is thanks to one thing. A single human child. A girl, in London, who believed in magic totally. Who hoped and hoped for a miracle every single day. She was the child who believed in Father Christmas before anyone else. And she was the one who helped Father Christmas, just as his reindeer were starting to struggle, because the amount she hoped, while she was lying in bed that Christmas Eve, added light to the sky. It gave Father Christmas a purpose. A direction. And he followed a thin trace of light all the way to her home, at 99 Haberdashery Road, in London.

And once that was done, once he had placed a full stocking of toys at the foot of her bug-ridden bed, the hope grew. Magic was there, in the world, and it spread among the dreams of all children. But Father Christmas couldn’t fool himself. Without that one child, that eight-year-old girl called Amelia Wishart, hoping so hard for magic to be real, Christmas would never have happened. Yes, it took elves and reindeer and the workshop and all of that, but she was the one who saved it. The dream of magic.

She was the first child.

The girl who saved Christmas.

And Father Christmas would never forget it. . . .