@nxnwrocks
Well, let’s see… N.B.: I’m taking the OP to refer to the whole Christmas season, which for me includes both the buildup and, indeed, the Twelve Days (Christmastide).
I usually read Philip Van Doren Stern’s “The Greatest Gift,” a lovely short story that inspired Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life. Very good, very kind-hearted (without mawkishness), and very interesting as the story on which the movie is based. I recommend it—and it was recently released in a beautiful edition, the one I own.
For some reason that even I cannot fathom, I also usually read Ellery Queen’s Christmas-set
The Finishing Stroke, a detective-story with one of the best set-ups one can think of—matched, unfortunately, by one of the worst solutions (depending on one’s knowledge of the
Phoenician alphabet,
heaven help us!). Well… In my defense, it’s a great, very Christmassy set-up, far better than a more famous Christmas-set mystery, Agatha Christie’s
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. But that solution!
The best Christmas-set detective-story I know, by the way, is John Dickson Carr’s “Blind Man’s Hood.” A marvellous amalgamation of the wintry ghost story and the mystery—and one of the few, but notable, Carrs to involve
the genuinely supernatural.
Ghost stories… I used to read Russell Kirk’s delightfully chilling “The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion” near Christmas; I didn’t take the collection,
Ancestral Shadows, out of the library in time this year, but there are a few Christmas-set “wintry tales” in it. Fine book by one of my favorite authors and political theorists. (By the way, in that story Kirk introduced me to the great old Christmas games played throughout the Yuletide: Smee, Snapdragon, etc.) I discovered Edith Wharton’s “The Triumph of Night” this year—another one of the best Christmas ghost stories I’ve read. Highly recommended. (By the way, does anyone know if M.R. James wrote a Christmas ghost story? I should already know this.)
Of course Dr. Seuss’s
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Clement Clarke Moore’s (
or Henry Livingston Jr.’s?) “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” A few that I do
not read every year but that are nonetheless recommended: Truman Capote’s
A Christmas Memory and Sir Terry Pratchett’s
Hogfather. I don’t read Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol every year (though I do watch at least one of the adaptations), but I have read it and re-read it from time to time around Christmas. A children’s picture book, with beautiful illustrations, that I’ll recommend as well: Marc McCutcheon and Kate Kiesler’s
Grandfather’s Christmas Camp.
OK, going outside the range of the OP, so I’ll stop, but these are some favorites of mine.
