Overview
Our Christmases are marked by tradition—holiday recipes, handed-down decorations, each family's particular ritual for trimming the tree. But most of all this season is defined for us by stories, in the carols, pageants, verse, and prose we've associated with this holiday since our childhoods. In their retellings of their first Christmas, and of manifestations of its spirit throughout the ages, these stories carry within them our own Christmas past.
The Book of Christmas gathers together those standards of the season's literature which no Christmas anothology would be complete without—among them, the gospels according to St. Matthew and St. Luke, a selection of carols, O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi", and Clement C. Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas."