It was the 19th century which dreamt up Christmas as a holiday to embody our ideals of what childhood should be, but it finds its 20th-century apotheosis here, in this beautiful, wordless and entirely unsentimental picture book. The story is straightforward: boy builds snowman; snowman comes to life; charming high-jinks ensue; snowman melts. The Snowman, for the British in particular, is perhaps the closest since A Christmas Carol that any book has come to fully epitomising Christmas (this despite there being, as Raymond Briggs is always keen to point out, no reference to Christmas in the original book). It is simply impossible, when faced with a page of its pastel-and-crayon blizzard, Snowman and child mid-flight, to ignore the pull of one’s inner child - winter is suddenly alive again with twilight magic.
I wrote an article about depictions of winter, including Raymond Briggs' The Snowman, for the Review section of The Guardian at Christmas. You can read the full article here.
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