When you've overdosed on seasonal films, mince pies and other seasonal treats, cleansing and connecting with the true spirit of Christmas can be as easy as picking up a book. From heavyweight classics such as Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Raymond Briggs's The Snowman to more unusual, darker volumes by James Joyce, Ali Smith and Olga Tokarczuk, take a look at our festive reading list.
“Bah! Humbug!” goes the famous catchphrase of Ebeneezer Scrooge, the misanthropic protagonist of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, used to dismiss the yuletide season. Released in 1843 to immediate critical acclaim, the story follows Scrooge's moral renaissance after he is visited by three ghosts early one Christmas morning. With its universal messages of goodwill and compassion, the book has been widely adapted for theatre and film adaptations (The Muppets Christmas Carol is a particular hoot), but there is no beating the punch of Dickens's original prose: “Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
It is ‘always winter but never Christmas,’ when Lucy, the protagonist of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, arrives in Narnia, a fantasy land she accesses through a wardrobe filled with fur coats. She meets the half-centaur Mr. Tumnus who kindly warms her up with tea and sardines on toast, and explains the lay of the land. Narnia is reigned over by the malevolent White Witch, who locks the snowy land in a perpetual frost. Yet Lucy and her sibling's subsequent arrival to Narnia marks the beginning of a prophecy that will allow Christmas, and the following seasons, to come again.
A nod to the aforementioned The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Northern Lights (1995) (known in America as The Golden Compass) opens with the protagonist, Lyra, hiding in an oak wardrobe. Initially set amongst the halls and libraries of Oxford University, the orphaned Lyra goes on an adventure to the Arctic. Featuring speaking bears, children-catching ‘Gobblers,’ mystery particles called ‘dust’ and soul-like animal dæmons, Northern Lights is as imaginative as it is philosophical, inspiring for both adults and children.
‘Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without any presents!' These are the opening lines of Louisa May Alcott's 1868 Little Woman, which follows the lives of the March sisters, Amy, Beth, Jo and Meg, who are coming of age during the American Civil War. Little Women seduces readers with its cosy domesticity and portrayal of sisterly solidarity and is equal parts tender and tongue-in-cheek humorous: 'Jo's nineteen hairpins all seemed stuck straight into her head, which was not exactly comfortable, but, dear me, let us be elegant or die,' says the narrator.
The longest story in his 1914 collection The Dubliners, James Joyce's ‘The Dead’ revolves around a family Christmas party on the first week of January – most probably the feast of the epiphany. From Gabriel Conroy (perhaps ironically named after Angel Gabriel) who is worried about delivering a speech and Lily the caretaker's with her deathly exhaustion to The Three Graces (the family's musical aunts) – the clattering cast of characters make up a tale that T.S. Eliot described as 'one of the greatest short stories ever written'.
The second of four novels in Ali Smith's ‘seasonal quartet’, which she wrote at rapid speed over the course of a year, in Winter (2022) a family comes together for Christmas festivities at a house in Cornwall. Yet there's no straightforward sentimentality here. Smith's writing is grandly laid with literary intertextuality and political reference. In Winter, Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Donald Trump, 1970s feminism, as well as Biblical ‘visitations’ are all in the mix.
Raymond Briggs's 1978 picture book The Snowman is entirely wordless, but it doesn't need narration to be one of the most profound stories in the Christmas canon. The thin volume tells the story of a little boy in England whose snowman comes to life at midnight. Together they fly across the South Downs – spot the Brighton Pavilion – and pay a visit to the South Pole. Yet sadly, the friendship, like the snow, cannot last forever.
A parody of earthy fictions by Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence, the 1932 Cold Comfort Farm is a comical portrayal of rural life in England. The novel follows Flora, a society girl who, déclassée after the death of her parents, is forced to live with distant cousins. It is a story of town meets country which parodies rural dialect as much as snobby Freudians from Hampstead. Written by Stella Gibbons at the age of 30, it achieved critical success and was followed up with Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm in 1940.
‘One bitter cold day near Christmastime the tailor began to make a coat, a coat of cherry-coloured corded silk embroidered with pansies and roses,’ begins The Tailor of Gloucester, Beatrix Potter's illustrated book about little mice who help a tailor finish making a waistcoat (supposedly based on a true story). The pretty 1901 work was written for Freda Moore, the daughter of Potter's former governess, and was allegedly Potter's favourite of her books.
‘In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.’ The title of this novel by Nobel-prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk gets its title from these lines in a William Blake poem, and is about a whimsical woman in Poland. The murder-fuelled thriller includes dark forests, disappearing dogs, astrology, corrupt Catholic priests and a lot of snow.
For fans of non-fiction, consider the American humorist David Sedaris's 1997 collection Holidays on Ice. With essays on his stint working in a mall grotto as a Santa elf, neighbours who battle to outdo each other on their Christmas generosity, a review of a local school's nativity pageant, the collection will raise a smile no matter how much one's family member is getting on one's nerves.
