Incongruence is always interesting, so the news earlier this year that Anthony Neilson, bad-boy author of adult plays such as Penetrator, The Censor and The Wonderful World of Dissocia, was penning a Christmas play — suitable for kids — at the Royal Court came as something of a delightful surprise. It was also clearly a chance to make amends for The Lying Kind, his 2002 seasonal venture at this address, which received what are politely called mixed reviews. This time, it's good to be able to report that his new festive comedy, which opened last night amid gales of laughter, proves that he has returned to top form.

With the lightning speed of online delivery, there is still masses of time to select the best and most enjoyable presents for Christmas, thanks to the taste and wisdom of theartsdesk's pack of writers.

Welcome to the stinking, sprawling Bayou Mansions – the thorn in a prosperous city’s side, the “short-and-curly hair in the mouthful of sponge cake”. So cramped there isn’t even room to swing a rat (and there are plenty), so corrosive that everything here starts life as a bad smell. Forget the enchanted worlds of fable and fairy tale, this is a dystopian childhood fantasy masterminded by the select team of Kurt Weill, Kafka and the Wicked Witch from Snow White. As delicious as it is delicately malevolent, The Animals and Children Took to the Streets is a strychnine-laced gumdrop of a show, and slips down all too sweetly.

What a stunning show Matthew Bourne has created in his Blitz-era Cinderella - truly a magical ride created from what was in its original 1997 form a pumpkin waiting to be transformed. This must be the most heartwarming and sophisticatedly rewarding Christmas show in London, filled with a huge love of the city and a moving homage to humanity in wartime.

Ding dong, merrily on high! Christmas is almost upon us, and those girding themselves for a ghastly family get-together, complete with forced good cheer, paper hats and booze-fuelled bust-ups can see all their worst domestic nightmares enacted in Alan Ayckbourn’s bilious tragi-farce. Painfully funny and piercingly desolate, it’s a side-aching, heartbreaking depiction of loneliness, self-delusion and misery in middle-class suburbia. And Marianne Elliott’s excruciatingly fine production is as sour and dyspeptic as a Boxing Day hangover.

A lot of ink gets spilled about the quest for the next great new British musical, which results in pedestrian endeavours - you know who you are - being elevated beyond all common sense. And now, along comes Matilda, a holiday entertainment about a surpassingly smart young girl who is capable of magic, and guess what? The show itself is as smart and magical as its pint-sized, eponymous heroine, and something more than that, as well.

It’s the time of year when Tate Britain unveils its much-anticipated, artist-designed Christmas tree. Over the years, we’ve had Fiona Banner decorating hers with unpainted Airfix models of fighter planes, while Sarah Lucas hung hers with stuffed tights instead of baubles. Tacita Dean vied between tradition and Minimalism with a simple arrangement of beeswax candles, while both Mark Wallinger and Julian Opie decided to forego the fir tree altogether: Wallinger opted for a bare, spindly aspen decked with mass-produced Catholic rosary beads, while, true to his cartoon/Ikea aesthetic, Opie’s contribution was a fake forest of painted trees made of intersecting planes of wood.

Swallows and Amazons is a quintessentially English story: a heart-warming hymn to decent values, the codes of sailing and the youthful spirit of adventure. Set in 1929, at a time when the country faced financial meltdown, it is perhaps not surprising, in our equally uncertain times, that Arthur Ransome’s feelgood Lakeland classic should have been adapted for the stage. Tom Morris’s production of a very well-handled adaptation by Helen Edmundson with music and songs by Neil Hannon - better known as The Divine Comedy - fizzes with spirit and sparkles with invention.

It’s a neat conceit to set this retelling of Aladdin in Leeds’s Kirkgate Market, a short stroll across a dual carriageway from the West Yorkshire Playhouse. It’s still an evocative and atmospheric location, and worth visiting as an antidote to all that’s bland and corporate about modern Leeds. Barney George’s set is spanned by an impressively solid-looking wrought-iron staircase and walkway, climbed on, crawled under, dangled from, and at one point used as a percussion instrument.

So this is Christmas, a time to seek comfort in traditional nourishment both culinary and cultural. In Edinburgh, the King’s Theatre has been home to mainstream panto - the equivalent of serving up a hearty turkey with all the trimmings – since time immemorial, which leaves the capital’s other theatres jockeying for position. What to do? Hedge all bets and aim for different-but-not-too-different, or raise the stakes and try something more adventurous altogether?