Celebrate Christmas With These Ten Christmas Classics
Recommendations from Dickens to Alcott to Trollope to Gogol
It’s the most wonderful time of the year and the most wonderful time to read great classics. Christmas has been the setting and inspiration for so much great writing, and one of the best ways to embrace the festive and contemplative nature of the season is by enjoying this literature. We’ve put together a list of ten classic Christmas reads – many are short stories, poems, or novellas, so they are perfect for reading in one sitting or reading aloud with loved ones.
Most of the titles we list below are available in this great one volume collection, The Ultimate Compendium of Christmas Classics, or in the four-volume Treasury of Timeless Christmas Tales (vol ii, vol iii, and vol iv here). We also recommend this one volume Dickens Christmas Collection (including A Christmas Carol, and his other Christmas novellas) and this one volume Alcott Christmas Collection (including the Christmas scene from Little Women and all the rest of Louisa May Alcott’s Christmas-themed short stories).
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1. Charles Dickens’s Christmas Novellas.
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s redemptive tale of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, is the quintessential Christmas story. But it wasn’t his only Christmas novella. From 1843 through 1848, Dickens published a short Christmas novel nearly every year, and they are among his most delightful and accessible works – The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man & The Ghost’s Bargain.
2. L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
When he wasn’t publishing new additions to his phenomenally successful The Wonderful Wizard of Oz series, L. Frank Baum found time to write this 1902 bestselling childrens story – an imaginative and engaging telling of Santa Claus’s backstory, from his childhood in the Forest of Burzee to his adulthood in the Laughing Valley of Hohaho, and his various voyages and discoveries before embracing the mission for which he is best known.
3. ETA Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King
While The Nutcracker is most famous today as a ballet, this short story by Prussian author E.T.A. Hoffmann was Tchaikovsky’s inspiration – the story of a young girl’s favorite toy nutcracker coming to life to wage battle against an evil Mouse King, before taking her on a magical voyage.
4. Louisa May Alcott’s Christmas Stories
Few writers have better captured the magic and beauty of Christmas than Louisa May Alcott. From the memorable holiday scenes in her timeless masterpiece Little Women to numerous short stories – e.g., A Christmas Dream And How It Came to Be, Tessa’s Surprise, Tilly’s Christmas, and many more – family and tradition are often at the center of her work, and the holidays provide the perfect stage for her literary talents.
5. Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales
Hans Christian Andersen wrote so many memorable stories that are perfect for the holidays – The Snow Queen, which was the inspiration for Disney’s Frozen; The Fir-Tree, a story told from the perspective of a fir tree destined to be cut down as a Christmas decoration; and The Little Match-Girl, depicting a dying girl’s dreams of Christmas. Andersen’s original fairy tales are much darker than their modern film adaptations, but they are complex and fascinating reads.
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The First Christmas of New England
Though of course most famous for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe set much of her other fiction in New England’s Puritan past, including this memorable short story, depicting the Pilgrims’ first Christmas in America in 1620.
7. William Dean Howells’s Christmas Every Day
Though not as well-known today, William Dean Howells was considered to be the father of American literary realism, his late 19th century novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes eschewing sentimentality and depicting the stark realities of a changing America. His short story Christmas Every Day is a literary departure for him, but it is a charming read, telling the sweet story of a young girl whose wish that everyday be Christmas miraculously comes true, with comical results and lessons learned.
8. Anthony Trollope’s Christmas at Thompson Hall
Most famous for his Barsetshire Chronicles and Palliser Novels – psychologically complex and wryly humorous works that are some of the best depictions of the culture and customs of middle class Victorian England – Christmas at Thompson Hall is Trollope’s contribution to the Yuletide genre. It tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Brown and their humorous efforts to make it back home in time for Christmas.
9. Nikolai Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas
This Christmas classic, from perhaps the funniest and most surreal writer of 19th century Russian literature, draws upon a Russian folklore belief that on the night before Christmas the devil is free to roam and sow mayhem. This is a hilarious tale of devils and witches, love rivalries and mischief, all set in rural Ukraine on the night of Christmas Eve. Originally written in 1831, it has been the inspiration of countless operatic, theatric, and film adaptations over the years
10. Clement Moore’s A Visit From St. Nicholas.
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there…
This is the quintessential Christmas poem. Originally published in 1823, Moore’s depiction of St. Nick’s annual visit to the homes of good girls and boys is largely responsible for the modern conception of Santa Claus in the American imagination and continues to delight readers of all ages, year after year.
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