Every year for more than 30 years, GK Chesterton wrote five or six articles and a number of poems about Christmas. Chesterton’s friend and biographer Maisie Ward once wrote that she had an ambition to collect all of Chesterton’s writings on Christmas into one volume. But it was the writer Marie Smith who first assembled a book of Christmas pieces and poems by Chesterton. This was followed by no fewer than five such collections. Chesterton’s secretary, Dorothy Collins, assembled six. Why was Christmas and its celebration so important to Chesterton? One reason – though not, I shall suggest, the most important – was connected with his love of children. Childhood, for Chesterton, was a time of great clarity of vision. In his 1933 book on St Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton said that the Angelic Doctor’s intellectual grasp of great realities had led him, at the last, to the clarity and innocence of the child. He offered an unforgettable evocation of the philosopher’s death: