Christmas windows are an institution, a festive milestone, a jolly early-December treat: spotting your first one is on a par with hearing your first Christmas song of the year or taking a bite out of your first Christmas sandwich. And there was a big Christmassy gift for the fashion press this morning when Mulberry rounded up a band of journalists and unveiled their Christmas 2013 windows. 

The brand has colonised windows at Harrods, where they currently have a pop-up store, and enlisted fashion’s favourite set designer, Shona Heath, to create a series of twinkly festive scenes. Using the English countryside at Christmas as a starting point, Heath has imagined a Winter Wonderland-type world, complete with fake snow, woodland creatures, frozen lakes and, of course, lots and lots of Mulberry bags.      

A fairy tale theme is also at play in the brand’s Christmas campaign and they have recruited the actor Allen Leech (Downton Abbey’s Tom Branson and a man you often spot at a fashion party), the poet Murray Lachlan Young and Kids Company founder Camila Batmanghelidjh to read fairy tales at the Harrods pop-up space (monogramming and special gift-wrapping is also on offer at the Knightsbridge space). Leech read his this morning and a video of that will form the basis of a competition on the Mulberry site from 4pm this afternoon: guess the book he is reading from correctly and you could win a Mulberry gift for yourself. 

Which would be a lovely happily-ever-after outcome.