With its thick, flecked cream paper and rich gold artwork, Silent Night: The Song From Heaven is a very attractive, appealing book for Christmas giving. Both text and pictures reflect on the carol itself, rather than the famous story of how it came to be written. (On Christmas Eve, 1818, in the Austrian village of Oberndorf, a broken organ prompted the parish priest and the organist to compose a new Christmas song that could be accompanied by guitar.)

Readers may find this book not quite what they expected: the story of the carol’s composition is placed at the end of the book. Also at the end are an account of how the song was sung by German and English troops in the trenches during an unofficial Christmas ceasefire in 1914, a historical note on scherenschnitte (the cut paper art used to illustrate this book), and two verses of the carol in English and German. In the main part of her text, Granfield describes the villagers of Oberndorf assembling the crèche of wax figures to decorate their church for Christmas. At the foot of each page, the childish voices of Hans and Maria ask questions about the first Christmas: “Did the lambs keep the Baby warm on that night long ago?” whispered Hans. “Did their bleating chase sleep away from the Little One?”

The evocation here of the magical atmosphere of Christmas Eve appeals to the senses – smells of Christmas baking and fresh pine boughs, flickering candlelight, and tiny silver bells tinkling on the blankets of the camels being set in the crèche. As the children’s questions are prompted by the placing of the various figures in the crèche, those figures in turn are featured in the intricate gold cut paper illustration on the facing page. These scherenschnitte illustrations are the striking feature of the book: delicate individual silhouettes form part of a composite grouping framed in geometrical figures of circle and star. As the text reflects on both the assembly of the crèche and the biblical story it depicts, the silhouettes on different levels present both the villagers of Oberndorf and the nativity scene. Although it is not so much a book about the carol as its title suggests, Silent Night succeeds in evoking both nostalgia and the spiritual dimension of Christmas.