The Christmas Almanac and The Little Big Book of Christmas. Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Christmas Collection and The Kingfisher Book of Classic Christmas Stories. A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens, for that matter: I’ve never quite understood why people give Christmas books for Christmas.
I mean, by the time you’ve actually gotten the book–and gone to church, and drunk the eggnog, and eaten the dinner, and cleaned up the wrapping paper, and squabbled with your sister, and blown out the candle stubs–Christmas is pretty much done for the year. All those endless seasonal volumes piled up like the Step Pyramid of Djoser down at the local Barnes & Noble: They really exist to gin up Christmas spirits of their givers, rather than their receivers.
Of course, since gift-givers tend to be the actual purchasers of Christmas presents, it makes a certain financial sense for publishers to concentrate on what inspires them, rather than what the incidental gift-getter might want to read. Which is probably why Amazon.com lists 1,271 books printed this year with the word Christmas in the title. From An Affair Before Christmas (a bodice-ripper in which the devilishly attractive Duke of Fletcher is determined to win back his beguiling bride’s delectable affections) to Shall I Knit You a Hat? (a Christmas yarn in which Mother Rabbit knits Little Rabbit a hat to show off his long, beautiful ears), there’s something in print for even the most jaded giver.
What the victims of these gifts think is another matter. I know it’s only once a year, but that still seems a poor excuse for clogging up a man’s bookshelves every twenty-fifth of December. Look, there are plenty of great stories out there for putting you in the Christmas mood. If it’s a little Yule comedy you want, try William Dean Howells’s droll “Christmas Every Day” or Siegfried Lenz’s slapstick “A Risk for Father Christmas.” I’ve always had a soft spot for Sophie Swett’s utterly sappy “How Santa Claus Found the Poor-House,” but in a pinch I can make do with O. Henry’s perfectly constructed tearjerker “The Gift of the Magi.” Damon Runyon’s “The Three Wise Guys” will never let you down–to say nothing of the Gospel of Luke, chapter two.
But the time for reading all these stories comes in the days before Christmas, the fast run of Advent. Once Christmas has rolled around, it’s gotten a little late for visions of sugar plums to dance in our heads. In fact, the real quiet time, the not-a-creature-stirring moment, isn’t the night before Christmas. It comes the next evening, the night of Christmas itself, when finally everything calms down and there’s room to look at all the real books–from the aunts and uncles, the grandparents, the cousins, the family friends–that used to blizzard our Christmases when my sisters and I were young.
I’d build a bulwark on the bed and, book by book, browse them all. Zane Grey and Lord Dunsany. H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. Dickens, always Dickens. Robert Louis Stevenson. The actual Christmas books–I remember The Golden Book of Christmas Tales in there somewhere, and The Birds’ Christmas Carol, a soppy 1886 classic by Kate Douglas Wiggin–always came from our non-bookish friends and were politely but determinedly set aside on Christmas night. That was the time for R Is for Rocket, and Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, and Kim, and The Kid Who Batted 1.000, and The Count of Monte Cristo.
I remember the slick feel of the purple dust-jacket on Journey to the Center of the Earth, already sliding off the book on that first Christmas reading. I remember tearing through Cannery Row and Catcher in the Rye because the paperbacks had such vivid covers I figured they had to be as good as Shane and Podkayne of Mars. They weren’t.
Those books had almost a taste and a texture–mostly from that irreproducible new-book smell: like slippery elm, maybe, or vanilla; a pulpy, woodbark scent, compounded with linen and glue and black ink gall into a kind of oddly aged freshness, old and new at the same time. There was The Lord of the Rings when I was ten or eleven: three fat paperbacks in a box that ripped the first time I took them out. And there was Homer Price when I was six: an oversized, illustrated hardback, like a toddler’s first steps out of picture books. And there was Freddy the Pig and The Wind in the Willows and Ivanhoe and A Canticle for Leibowitz and on and on.
They always seemed to smell like an impossible abundance in the midst of a cold winter. They smelled, in truth, like Christmas.
