Christmas is a time for giving — book-giving, that is. Whether you’re the shopper or the reader, here are some rather unusual Christmas reads for you or a loved one to enjoy this holiday season.
Did you know that in Iceland, the publishing cycle for new books is pretty much contained entirely to the few months preceding Christmas? They even have a specific name for it – Jólabókaflóð, that is, the Christmas book flood. The reason for this commercial choice is all to do with the longstanding Icelandic tradition of book-gifting on Christmas Eve.
Of course, many of us all over the world love to give and receive books as a matter of course, but in Iceland, the custom is so deeply ingrained in the culture – Iceland is, after all, one of the most literate countries in the world, and it’s estimated that one in every ten citizens will publish a book – that a huge free catalogue of every new release is circulated annually to every home, and people take their perusal of it extremely seriously before gathering to exchange books on Christmas Eve.
Forget Black Friday, this is the way to go, people. I, personally, advise that we respectfully steal this tradition from the people of Iceland and make this a thing worldwide. Shopping for your own Christmas book flood could incorporate book gifts of any description or genre, but just to kick things off, here are twelve books that incorporate the reason for the season – and each one has a bit of a twist to set it apart from a saccharine, Hallmark-style Christmas story.
‘Letters From Father Christmas’ by J. R. R. Tolkien
This volume, first published in 1976, contains over 20 years worth of letters that Tolkien wrote and illustrated – from the perspective of Father Christmas – to his children each holiday season, from 1920 to 1942. Each year, the Tolkien children would receive updates from Father Christmas or his secretary elves, filling them in on the latest adventures at the North Pole.
It has been suggested that many of the creatures invented in the Father Christmas letters may have been precursors to the later inhabitants of Middle Earth – Tolkien had been spinning these tales of fantasy for around 15 years before he started penning The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – and that Gandalf himself may have grown out of the author’s take on Father Christmas. Regardless of any Lord of the Rings collection, this is a lively and inventive Christmas book with a strange and significant origin. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘The Christmas Mystery’ by Jostein Gaarder
Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder, best known for the philosophical study Sophie’s World, is a master of the story-within-a-story format, and The Christmas Mystery is no exception. Paced over the period of Advent – from 1st to 25th December – young Joachim discovers a traditional advent calendar, which he takes home instead of a contemporary chocolate-filled one.
Each door he opens reveals a new chapter of another child’s Christmas story – a girl called Elisabet Hansen, who runs away from a department store in pursuit of a toy lamb that comes to life, and finds herself traveling across both land and time, to arrive in Bethlehem at the moment of Christ’s birth. The odd thing, as Joachim discovers, is that there really was an Elisabet Hansen who disappeared several decades earlier… Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming’ by Lemony Snicket
This delightfully illustrated children’s book by A Series of Unfortunate Events’ Lemony Snicket – that is, Daniel Handler, in real life, whose father was a Jewish refugee from Germany. The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming is a absurd, comedic and subversive exploration of Hanukkah traditions and the way that commercialization of the holidays has caused ideas to blend together.
As the errant latke meets a variety of Christmas symbols, it’s clear that they’re all ignorant to the Hanukkah customs and are determined to assign comparisons to the Christian traditions. When the latke attempts to educate others about his own relevance, he’s continuously shut down and basically runs around screaming in rage. Eventually, he’s understood – and subsequently eaten – by, presumably, a nice Jewish family. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ by Helen Fielding
Both Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason are technically the story of a complete year, from January to December, however the crux of the action does take place over the holiday season, from the set-up of Bridget’s story, making resolutions on New Year’s Day, to the culmination of a year’s worth of confusing and thrilling romance on Christmas Day.
Moreso than that, in Bridget’s relationship with her parents – particularly the numerous gatherings of family friends where she’s expected to make an appearance – Fielding captures so perfectly the awkwardness of adulthood, the horror of holiday parties where one is expected to answer all sorts of personal questions that one does not feel equipped, emotionally, to handle, from people who’ve known you since you were in diapers. What’s more Christmassy than that? I tell you, nothing. Pass the sherry. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘Santa’s Husband’ by Daniel Kibblesmith
This is why Twitter was invented. New to bookstore shelves this year, Santa’s Husband is the picture book we all deserve. Author Daniel Kibblesmith, a writer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, turned a viral tweet about how his future child would only believe in Black Santa – and that all white Santas they saw would be referred to as the real Santa’s husband – into a collaboration with illustrator AP Quach, and managed to nab a book deal with Harper Collins.
What started as a joke in December 2016 is now a real, physical product available for purchase in December 2017, so that your child can, too, learn the real truth about Santa – that he’s a gay Black man whose husband frequently fills in for him at mall appearances. A clever, funny and necessary reminder that Santa is for everyone. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘Matchless: A Christmas Story’ by Gregory Maguire
A Christmas story by Gregory Maguire? Oooof. This gonna be good. Maguire is most famously known as the author of Wicked, the flipped-on-its head story of the Witches of Oz which, in its Broadway musical form, has pretty much outstripped the popularity of L. Frank Baum’s original. The Wizard of Oz is far from the only fairy tale Maguire has twisted – it’s pretty much his raison d’être.
In 2009, NPR commissioned him to write a new and unique Christmas story. Maguire chose to reinvent Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl, and the result – first read aloud and later published as an illustrated novella – ties together the tragedy of the doomed heroine with the characters that moved around her, suggesting the possibilities of hope, redemption and eternal life. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror’ by Christopher Moore
Set during Christmas in Pine Cove, California – Moore’s fictional coastal town which features as the setting in many of his novels – The Stupidest Angel follows the angel Raziel, who’s been sent to Earth to grant the wish of a child. Awww, how heartwarming. Except not, because little Joshua Barker has just seen Santa Claus brutally murdered with a shovel, and he’s praying for Santa to be brought back from the dead. What Josh actually saw was rather less fantastical but even more horrific.
The man who played Santa in the town parade, nasty real estate developer Dale Pearson, was taken out by his ex-wife Lena Marquez in an act of self defense, but Raziel – deeply, deeply stupid, as the title suggests – attempts to grant Joshua’s wish, and the end result is zombies. Yeah, the traditional Yuletide zombies. You can read this satirical Christmas tale as a total standalone, but it does feature multiple characters from Moore’s other novels, as he writes nearly entirely within the same universe. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘The Twelve Terrors of Christmas’ by John Updike
The words of esteemed American novelist, poet and critic John Updike – one of only three writers to ever win the Pulitzer for Fiction more than once – meet the scratchy gothic drawings of Edward Gorey, purveyor of peculiar nonsense (and the illustrator Tim Burton has spent his entire career attempting to emulate) in The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, another piece that started life as a featured article – in The New Yorker – and eventually printed and bound as its own book.
It’s a cynical and questioning look at some of our most beloved Christmas traditions, twisting them around and making them creepy as hell. (“What is really going on? Why do these purported elves submit to sweatshop conditions in what must be one of the gloomiest climates in the world…”) Gorey also produced The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas, a retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with a notably less hopeful outlook, and either of these horrible little books are sure to be a hit with any Grinch in your life. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘You Better Not Cry’ by Augusten Burroughs
Burroughs is known for his many, many miserable memoirs – most famously Running With Scissors – and You Better Not Cry is a holiday-appropriate take on that theme. This collection of autobiographical Christmas stories is roughly chronological, charting Burroughs’ experiences with, and emotions about, the holidays, from a childhood memory biting the face off of a plaster model of Santa Claus, to a drunken tryst, twenty years later, with a very real man dressed as Santa Claus.
Burroughs’ self deprecating humor turns serious in his attempts, sometimes futile, sometimes not, to discover the true meaning of Christmas, particularly in the wake of his boyfriend dying of AIDS. For those dreading December 25, you can console yourself in the fact that Augusten Burroughs has probably had at least one Christmas that was way worse than any horrors you might face this year. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘Holidays On Ice’ by David Sedaris
If that’s all too dispiriting, then almost as truthful, but rather less miserable, is comedian David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice, another collection of autobiographical essays and short stories. Sedaris actually first rose to fame when one of these essays, Santaland Diaries, detailing his time working as an elf in Macy’s department store, was read on NPR in 1992.
He later published this volume combining that story with a variety of others, including a remembrance of a Christmas where he helped his sister rescue a local prostitute from an abusive relationship, a newspaper review of a school’s nativity play from a cruel and ruthless critic, and a story of neighbors battling to outdo each other with generosity. The audiobook version of this collection comes highly recommended, as well. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’ by C. S. Lewis
Christians, historically, have pretty much always usurped the midwinter festivities of any other religions or cultures they were looking to convert, so it’s only fitting that old mate Clive Staples would shoehorn Father Christmas into the gigantic Christian allegory with a healthy dose of paganism that is the Chronicles of Narnia. Don’t get me wrong, the Narnia books are very, very dear to me, but reading them as a child is a shockingly different experience to reading them as an adult – things about a fantasy world that a child would never question become real eye openers.
Anyway, when the Pevensies first enter Narnia, the curse of the White Witch sees the land in an eternal winter – always winter but never Christmas. Why a fictional parallel fantasy universe has a Christmas, specifically, is a question for Clive, but as the kids help restore Aslan – that is, Jesus – to his rightful place of power, their encounter with Father Christmas and the gifts he bestows upon them certainly play a crucial role. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.
‘Hogfather’ by Sir Terry Pratchett
The 20th book set in Sir Terry’s Discworld universe, and one of the most beloved – indeed, one of only a small handful to receive a screen adaptation, if that’s something you put store in – is a Christmas story of sorts. The titular Hogfather himself is the Discworld’s iteration of Santa Claus, a winter god who originated with the tradition of a midwinter sacrifice to bring about spring, and who over time has been slightly de-fanged – in Discworld’s present day, the Hogfather is expected to wear a long red cloak and travel by sleigh, leaving gifts for the children that believe in him on Hogswatchnight.
Hogfather, the novel, is the story of an attempt on the Hogfather’s life, ordered by the Auditors of Reality – the bureaucratic gods who recur as villians in the series – as his existence and actions don’t reflect their views of the universe. Death and his granddaughter Susan undertake a mission to rescue him, with Death acting as the Hogfather in the interim, in an attempt to keep the belief in the Hogfather alive.
Hogfather is, in and of itself, a story about belief and how it sets humanity apart, that the belief that we have in a Hogfather, that we will be recognized if we do something good or punished if we do something bad, is the same intangible power that means we have qualities, such as justice and mercy and duty, that make us a society. We have to start out believing the little lies in order to believe the big ones. “HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN,” Death explains, “TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE,” and that is precisely the point of it all. Buy on Book Depository or at your local retailer.