Christmas Tales

by Enid Blyton

Join Enid Blyton's happy band of toys in three adventures that capture all the joys of Christmas.
Stories include:
The Night the Toys Came to Life [original title: The Toys Come to Life (1943)]
Santa's Workshop [original title: Whiskers for the Cat (1951)]
Christmas in the Toyshop [original title: Oh! What a Lovely Time (1949)]

Genres: Christmas

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

See also:
Ένιντ Μπλάιτον (Greek)
Enida Blaitona (Latvian)
Энид Блайтон (Russian)
Inid Blajton (Serbian)
Інід Блайтон (Ukrainian)

Enid Mary Blyton (1897–1968) was an English author of children's books.

Born in South London, Blyton was the eldest of three children, and showed an early interest in music and reading. She was educated at St. Christopher's School, Beckenham, and - having decided not to pursue her music - at Ipswich High School, where she trained as a kindergarten teacher. She taught for five years before her 1924 marriage to editor Hugh Pollock, with whom she had two daughters. This marriage ended in divorce, and Blyton remarried in 1943, to surgeon Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters. She died in 1968, one year after her second husband.

Blyton was a prolific author of children's books, who penned an estimated 800 books over about 40 years. Her stories were often either children's adventure and mystery stories, or fantasies involving magic. Notable series include: The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers, Noddy, The Wishing Chair, Mallory Towers, and St. Clare's.

According to the Index Translationum, Blyton was the fifth most popular author in the world in 2007, coming after Lenin but ahead of Shakespeare.

See also her pen name Mary Pollock

Reviews

[Christina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Enid Blyton books when I was young. My mother would read me the Faraway Tree series that she read when she was a child. So when I stumbled on this collection of three Christmas stories by Blyton, I was ready for some new stories that would spark some nostalgia.
But I was disappointed. The stories are rather bland and lack the magic and imagination of the Blyton books I'm familiar with. I didn't care at all for the illustrations. I even questioned if Blyton really wrote these stories or if they just used her brand. According to the Blyton Society website, she did publish them, and they were reissued as illustrated books in the 1980-1990s.
For reference, the stories included are:
The Night the Toys Came to Life [original title: The Toys Come to Life (1943)]
Santa's Workshop [original title: Whiskers for the Cat (1951)]
Christmas in the Toyshop [original title: Oh! What a Lovely Time (1949)]

The Night the Toys Came to Life is probably the oddest story, only because the night watchman catches the toys having their party, and then he crawls through the window to join them. Then the children in the house also join the party. And yet the parents do not wake and demand to know what a grown man is doing in their house playing with their children and their toys in the middle of the night. It was a more innocent time, I suppose. But I don't know why it wasn't just the children.

[Dolly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this would be a nice collection of stories to read to our girls. They thought the stories were okay, but they were way too long and irritatingly cutsey. I did not like them at all, although I tried to liven them up while I read them.