The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden

A similar sense of the deep human need to find a home – somewhere to belong, and people to belong to – informs The Story of Holly and Ivy, ensuring that it never tips over into mere Yuletide schmaltz. Rumer Godden is a writer who frequently twists the heart-strings – it's hard to read her 1972 classic The Diddakoi, about a half-Gypsy girl ruthlessly excluded by the conventional population of the village where she finds herself living bereaved and alone, without shedding a couple of surreptitious tears. She finds Holly waiting for her underneath it. The tree, beaming gently from the Jones's front window, magnetically draws Ivy – cold, disconsolate and dusted with flour from sleeping against the back wall of a bakery – to her 'grandmother'. Mrs Jones longs for a little girl – so much so that this year she has bought and decorated a tiny tree, defying her husband's gentle mockery. The third strand in the story belongs to Mr and Mrs Jones, a policeman and his wife in attractive, redheaded middle age, who have no children. Then Holly and Ivy see each other through the shop window. Appalled, Holly wishes strenuously to be purchased – but no one comes to buy her, and it's already closing time on Christmas Eve. If the toys are not sold today, Abracadabra threatens, they will be 'put into storage' – a dark, cobwebby prospect overseen by the predatory bird himself.

Meanwhile, Holly, a pearly-toothed, brown-eyed porcelain beauty in a scarlet party dress, makes her debut in Mr Blossom's toyshop, under the minatory eye of Abracadabra the owl.

The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden