Childhood books – The Snowman

Everyone has those few books which they had when they were a kid which mean something to them and which they will never get rid of.  So, I thought I’d start a small feature showing you a few of my own childhood favourites.

To start, I’m going to talk about this little treasure:

There’s no doubt about it, The Snowman by Raymond Briggs is a classic.  Not only is it an adorable novel but it has also been transformed into a super famous one-off Christmas show with a gorgeous soundtrack.

The Snowman is short but this certainly doesn’t undermine the wonderfulness of the story.  It probably isn’t many of you, but for those of you who don’t know the story I’ll give a brief synopsis...

It’s Christmas time and a small boy wakes up one morning, looks out the window and gleefully discovers that there has been a heavy snowfall the previous night.  As soon as he can he dashes outside to build a snowman that, over night, comes to life and takes him on an all-night magical adventure that he’ll never forget.

The reason that I loved this book was not just because of the lovely storyline but also because of the book itself.  The book has no words but the story is still told so beautifully through lots and lots of pretty, little sketches.  And these are translated so well onto the screen that every year that I watch it I end up with happy tears!

So if you haven’t seen this book before then buy it, borrow it (whatever you like), look at the gorgeous illustrations and see if you can extract the wonderful story from it.