Robin’s Christmas Song: a bird’s-eye view of the nativity that invites children to encounter Jesus

Tell us the inspiration behind the story to Robin’s Christmas Song. 

There are a couple of inspirations. 

Of course, the first is the Bible! Some 15 years ago at church, I was reading through the passages of Luke and I realised that they’re written in such a poetic way, that they’re not just poems, they’re songs. They’re people speaking or singing out in praise to Jesus. And I realised there’s loads of it around Jesus’ birth. There’s no other event in the Bible where everyone just keeps bursting into these poetic outbursts of praise. 

I then get this job with Scripture Union and they haven’t had a new Christmas book for years, so the very first thing I do is I have to write a Christmas book. The pressure felt quite big, but then a friend sent me a book that she’d written about a musical instrument. As I was giving her feedback, I got in the groove of being creative and I remembered this recollection from years ago, how there’s loads of singing at Jesus’ birth. Then I thought, “Why not?”