Over the past decade, I've had a tradition of reading a Doctor Who Christmas book every Christmas. (Scroll down on this page to see the complete list.) Last year, I reached the endpoint of that tradition when I read the last one I hadn't read, Dave Rudden's The Wintertime Paradox.
Except that there are a number of Doctor Who Christmas short stories only available on the Internet or in various periodicals that have never been collected or reprinted. Once I finished The Wintertime Paradox, I spent some time tracking them all down, and this Christmas I read that "book." Here is a handy guide to all of them, along with my thoughts. (This is an expanded version of a GallifreyBase post; thanks to the commenters there for cluing me into an extra one.)
Doctor Who Magazine
Somewhat surprisingly, I think DWM have only ever done just one prose Christmas story.
- Prelude to The Left-Handed Humminbird by Kate Orman (Doctor Who Magazine, no. 207, 22 Dec. 1993). Most of Virgin's The New Doctor Who Adventures had exclusive preludes published in DWM; this one happens to be set on Christmas. It's very much scene-setting for the novel, and the Christmas elements are incidental. But, you know, it's by Kate Orman, so it's well-written and horrific. Someday I'll read the book. Like all the preludes, it's been copied out on the unofficial Doctor Who Reference Guide, so it is easily accessed.
Newspaper Stories
Two times Paul Cornell published a Doctor Who short story around Christmas time. This sort of became a trilogy; see below under Unofficial but Interesting.
- "Deep and Dreamless Sleep" by Paul Cornell (Sunday Times, 24 Dec. 2006). The tenth Doctor encounters a five-year-old boy who hijacks the TARDIS in search of a perfect Christmas. It's by Paul Cornell, so it's pretty good. The ending in particular is great. It has some bits that made me think he had to condense it to fit the newspaper's space, but overall you can't go wrong with Paul Cornell doing Doctor Who at Christmas. (His anthology Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury is a thing of beauty.) [Link takes you to an archived copy of part 1 of 6. To get all six part, I think I signed up for a Times account and cancelled before the free trial ended.]
- "The Hopes and Fears of All the Years" by Paul Cornell (Daily Telegraph, 22 Dec. 2007). Another story of the tenth Doctor at Christmas; this one is about him popping in to see a single family at multiple Christmases across the course of a boy's life. I really liked this one: sentimental without being mawkish, and I'm always a sucker for a bildungsroman, even in miniature.
Adventure Calendar
From 2006 to 2017, the BBC's official Doctor Who web site always promoted the upcoming Christmas special with the "Adventure Calendar," where every day from December 1st to Christmas Day, you could go to the official site and receive some kind of treat: desktop wallpapers, Flash games, interviews, commentary tracks, artwork, and fiction. Not all of this fiction was seasonally themed, but I've included here a list of all the stories that have Christmas or winter links. (Someday I'll do another post looking at the others.)
- "The Frozen" by Rupert Laight (2 Dec. 2007). The tenth Doctor takes a graduate student from the future back to the February 1814 frost fair, the last time the River Thames froze over. (Luckily he doesn't bump into the first Doctor or the twelfth; see Frostfire and "Thin Ice.") A lot of these Adventure Calendar stories are, to be honest, pretty mediocre. No characterization to speak of, just dialogue and actions, like a television script, with often awkward prose.
- "The Advent of Fear" Part One and Part Two by Mark B. Oliver (6 & 10 Dec. 2009). The tenth Doctor encounters a girl with an advent calendar that keeps sending her through time. To be honest, I was into this one at first, but in the end I found it rather confusing and disjointed. This is the first one to have a juvenile companion stand-in, which is true of most of these.
- "The Doctor on My Shoulder" Part One and Part Two by Daniel Roth (17 & 23 Dec. 2009). The Doctor gets shrunk down and ends up wrapped in someone's present. To be honest, that's a lot more interesting sounding than the story actually is. Again, a pedestrian runaround without a prose style, and I didn't find the alien plan very believable even by Doctor Who standards.
- "Snowfall" by Gavin Collinson and Mark B. Oliver (9-10, 17, 20, & 23-24 Dec. 2010). This is actually two short stories with a frame; they feature the eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory in the frame. It was released across several days (each of the embedded stories was divided in half), but then collected as a complete novella. In the first, Mark B. Oliver's "Cold Snap" the Doctor bumps in a couple kids he met before in a previous web exclusive story (a Halloween one, so not relevant to this project) and also meets a guy named "Big Jack." They work together to stop a heat-draining alien on Christmas. The second, "Vampire Hurricane" by Gavin Collinson, is about the Doctor and a guy named David working together to stop a toy magnate from accidentally creating a vampire army on Christmas. The frame, also by Collinson, is about Big Jack and David—estranged brothers—reconciling... on Christmas. The embedded stories are fine, if a bit shallow like all the other Adventure Calendar tales. I didn't find the estranged brother thing worked at all.
- "Attack of the Snowmen" by Mark B. Oliver (20-21 & 24 Dec. 2011). The kids, Louie and Millie, from "The Night after Hallowe'en" and "Cold Snap" are back, this time facing evil killer snowmen with the eleventh Doctor, a year before Moffat did evil killer snowmen on tv. Once again, it has the same issues as all the others of these.
"Behind You" Parts One, Two, and Three by Mark Williams (19-21 Dec. 2014). Original fiction took a few years off, but returned with this twelfth Doctor story. Again, par for the course in terms of quality, but enlivened by a couple good jokes about how Peter Capaldi's Doctor hates panto.
"Haunted" Parts One, Two, and Three by Joseph Lidster (21 & 23-24 Dec. 2015). The Adventure Calendar continued a couple years after this, but without original fiction, alas. But! The last of these stories was undoubtedly the best of them. Of course it was—it's by one of my favorite Doctor Who writers, Joseph Lidster, who gives us a child protagonist with meaningful struggles, a sparky twelfth Doctor, and some good twists.
That was it for Doctor Who advent calendars, I guess because that was also it for Doctor Who Christmas specials. And also that was it for the BBC web site doing anything interesting, and that was also it for the producers of Doctor Who being interested in promoting the show. (Actually, we got a lot of cool web content during 2020 in Lockdown, but I don't think any of it was Christmas-related.)
BBC Studios Web Site Stories
We did, however, get two Christmas stories from the BBC Studios Doctor Who web site, in 2016 and 2020.
"Christmas Special" by Cavan Scott (23 Dec. 2016). This ninth Doctor and Rose short story ties into Titan's then-ongoing comic series, also featuring the original companion and a recurring character from that series. (It's set between the two stories collected in Official Secrets.) The story is pretty minimal, and it's a tie-in to a series I found pretty ho-hum. If this was meant to promote the comic series to a wider audience, maybe Tara should have been given any indication of being interesting at all.- "Canaries" by Dave Rudden (15 Oct. 2020). Okay, not released seasonally at all, but it is set on Christmas. It was a tie-in to both Time Lord Victorious and the anthology The Wintertime Paradox—and indeed, doesn't quite count as "uncollected" because it was added to Wintertime Paradox for its ebook and paperback releases, and thus I have read it already. It's a prequel to Wintertime Paradox that sets up the book's villains.
Unofficial but Interesting
Lastly, this category is made up of things that are not officially licensed (so they are technically fan fiction) but have some kind of claim to quasi-official status, usually based on who wrote them.
- "The Last Doctor" by Paul Cornell (13 Dec. 2009). Cornell posted this story on his blog. It's about what seems to be the last incarnation of the Doctor, at the very end of the universe, as the last humans experience the last Christmas. It's by Paul Cornell, so it's good—really captures that Doctor Who at Christmas vibe of hope in the face of the coldness of the universe. I really liked it, and it nicely caps off an emotional trilogy continuing from Cornell's two stories above, about the Doctor's emotional engagement with people.
"Mrs Wibbsey's Festive Diary" by Paul Magrs (21-27 Dec. 2013). Across seven blog entries in 2013, Paul Magrs serialized a Christmas story about Mrs Wibbsey, who was the fourth Doctor's companion in his Nest Cottage Chronicles series of audio dramas; in 2014, he rereleased it as a single post. It's told in the form of Mrs Wibbsey's diary as she waits for the Doctor to come back one Christmas in Hexford, but gets a very different Christmas visitor instead... It's by Magrs, so it has some good jokes, and is a bit meta about storytelling in a way that worked for me, especially at Christmas. (Some day I must actually listen to my Nest Cottage Chronicles box set!) Magrs collected this in an anthology of original fiction, but edited it to be about characters and situations not copyrighted to the BBC, so it became "Mrs Frimbly's Festive Diary."- "Who the Dickens...?" by Juliet E. McKenna (Paul Cornell's blog, 14 Dec. 2019). This third Doctor and Jo adventure was intended for Paul Cornell's Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury in 2004. However, it got cut because it conflicted with an episode of the upcoming screen revival: it features the Doctor going back in time and meeting Charles Dickens for the first time! So it was cut at the last minute, and posted to Cornell's blog fifteen years later. It's a cute story that I enjoyed reading; good handle on the Doctor and Dickens.
And that's it! It runs almost three hundred pages if formatted like the BBC's own anthologies. I have to say some of the stories are better than others—I tended to prefer ones that actually were Christmas stories rather than stories with Christmas trappings—but on the whole it makes for a nice Christmas treat to read them all.
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