The Enid Blyton Society

A lovely poem by Enid .. and great modern verses from Anita and Rob.

Brilliant first verse from Anita and a great second verse from Rob!

Amusing verses, Rob. I particularly like the last two lines:

Sometimes when mum's not looking, and nobody's about
I get my advent calendar and take the chocolates out.

Thank you! Your verse was brilliant! Who is going to write the rest? Come on, everyone!

Tony Summerfield wrote:I have now got the correct contents for Christmas Tales and if anyone is able to tell me where 'A Christmas Legend' is taken from I would love to know the answer!

http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/book ... tmas+Tales" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

'Christmas Tales' arrived today - and I like the look of it a lot - nice and chunky. My idea is to read one story each day throughout December. There are 25 stories, so that will take me to Christmas Day.


Having just read 'A Christmas Legend' just to see if I knew it, I can't say I recognise it from any EB books I own. Maybe it was only in a magazine, or perhaps in one of the short story collections I don't have. However, as I have very many of them, its a bit surprising I haven't read it before.

Its a quite short story - the type of thing that is in the early volumes, like 'Teacher's Treasury' or 'Happy Stories' or 'In Storyland'.

It's a religious tale about bells in a church that only rang on Christmas Eve, then stopped ringing until the people of the village brought gifts for The Christ Child. Two ragged boys propose to take their hard-earned money but on the way they give it to a man who looks poorer than themselves - and this kindness is what makes the bells ring again.

Does this story 'ring any bells' with anyone?

If it was in a magazine or in the short story collections, I bet Tony would have recognised it by now. I suspect A Christmas Legend is in one of the short stories collections with other authors compiled by other authors.

sixret wrote:If it was in a magazine or in the short story collections, I bet Tony would have recognised it by now. I suspect A Christmas Legend is in one of the short stories collections with other authors compiled by other authors.

I was presuming that Tony hadn't read the story as it appears in the new book...and it may well have been published with a totally different title in the past.

Although the book has only recently been published, Rob, I was actually sent a copy in July, so I have had it for a while. The story means nothing to me, but I really don't claim to be an expert on the short stories at all! Unlike the rest of you I didn't read any Enid Blyton as a child apart from two of the Adventure books, so I was already in my 40s before I started on the novels. I have recently spent several days compiling an index of uncollected short stories and I have almost 900 from four sources. World distributors changed a number of titles a few of which I have been unable to trace - but my method of tracing the source of stories was simply to check the first two lines and even that took a considerable time.

I didn't recognise the story at all - and I've read every short story of Enid's that I possess! The fact its quite a short story made me believe that it might be from a magazine or 'school book' rather than a short story collection.

Tony Summerfield wrote: I didn't read any Enid Blyton as a child apart from two of the Adventure books, so I was already in my 40s before I started on the novels.

I've heard of a late-developer, but that is stretching it a bit too far.

He's made up for it since, though!

Would the publishers of the book be able to tell us the short story's origin if we asked them?

pete9012S wrote:Would the publishers of the book be able to tell us the short story's origin if we asked them?

Or at least, where they'd got it from, even if it wasn't the original source.

Rob Houghton wrote:

pete9012S wrote:Would the publishers of the book be able to tell us the short story's origin if we asked them?

Or at least, where they'd got it from, even if it wasn't the original source.

The short answer is, no! I said in an email that I had no idea where this had been taken from when I checked the acknowledgements page, and the result of this was that it got removed from the page, but it is still in the book. The person who edited the book no longer works for Hodders.