The simple pleasure of the holiday season are lovingly portrayed in Raymond Briggs' The Snowman - and its creator doesn't go in for rampant Christmas consumerism either, choosing £3 shirts from charity shops and spurning foreign holidays.
He told the Radio Times: "Huge amounts of money have been generated by The Snowman. I'm not interested.
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The Snowman's creator Raymond Briggs
"I read it's sold three million copies, but publishers bandy about numbers that aren't usually true.
"I don't spend anything. I don't like going abroad - the Gatwick airport hell-hole.
"I buy clothes from charity shops, although I draw the line at trousers.
"I saw a shirt for £88, mine coast £3."
The famous book, which led to the animated version, was not about joy and Christmas, but about death, Briggs said.
"The idea was clean, nice and silent. I don't have happy endings. I create what seems natural and inevitable. The snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There's nothing particularly gloomy about it. It's a fact of life."
"I thought, 'It's a bit corny and twee, dragging in Christmas', as 'The Snowman' had nothing to do with that, but it worked extremely well."
"I support the principle of a day of feasting and presents, but the anxiety starts in October: how many are coming? Are they bringing grandchildren? How long will they stay?"
The 78-year-old author has finally agreed to a sequel to his classic TV version of The Snowman.
The TV version of The Snowman has been screened on Channel 4 every year since 1982 and a £2 million, 24-minute sequel, The Snowman And The Snowdog, is being broadcast this Christmas.
He endorsed the follow-up, partly because it was hand-drawn, and said: "It would have been cashing in to do it before. Now it won't do any harm, and it's not vulgar and American.
"I've never touched a computer, or anything like that. CGI makes everything too perfect, but they're sticking to the old ways. I'm a notorious grumbler, but I found nothing to grumble about."
Briggs admitted he does not read many children's books and is "not a fan of Christmas", despite the animated version of his famous book featuring a visit to Father Christmas at the North Pole.
"You can't keep up with the damned things," he said of children's books.
"I've never read Enid Blyton. I went once to Roald Dahl's birthday party so must have read something of his. He was fairly curmudgeonly."
The sequel's co-producer Camilla Deakin said most of the film was hand-drawn because "computer-generated imaging can be too perfect", but she added that computers were used at the end "to finesse the pictures, adding digital snow and lighting effects".