Holly from the Bongs is, to put it simply, a nativity play. It was written for the Cheshire village of Goostrey and performed at Christmas 1965 in the stable of the Crown Inn…. The effect of the book as a whole is overwhelmingly sincere and beautiful. You get the impression of a small, interdependent community with the freedom of the fields, of children being themselves and yet being partly translated by the feel of unfamiliar language and heightened emotion…. It is in the text … where Alan Garner has used local place-names freely. Cheshire is a county where mummers' plays still flourish, and he has offered such a play … as the shepherd's "present" to the infant Jesus—a bold stroke which links pagan and Christian stories in an extraordinary beauty of rhyme and prose. There is a delightful immediacy of local history here…. Everything is relaxed, friendly and yet hallowed—there is really no other word—by the depth of traditional feeling.