On Christmas

A Seasonal Anthology

edited by Rosie Heys

Notting Hill Editions, 166 pp., $18.95

As one popular theory goes, Charles Dickens deserves a lot of blame for popularizing Christmas as a carnival of conspicuous consumption. Ebenezer Scrooge, the iconic miser of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, expresses his spiritual reform by spending himself silly, promoting the profligate principle that Christmas is never really enough unless it’s too much.