Introduction

Christmas means different things to different people. To some it is a holiday known for the merriment of parties, gift-giving, tree-trimming, and other traditional festivities. To others, it is a time when families come together to count past blessings and look forward with hope to a new year of fulfillment. To still others still, it is a season of benevolence and charity, in which kindness is extended not only to family and friends but to those less fortunate than themselves.

Writers and poets know that Christmas means all these things and more, and the best of them have commemorated the many aspects of the yuletide season in works whose reading has become as much a part of the holiday as any other Christmas tradition. This colorfully illustrated holiday treasury brings together ten stories and nine poems that celebrate the Christmas season and its wide variety of expressions.

Certainly the best-known story in this book is A Christmas Carol, which Charles Dickens published in 1843 to raise social awareness of the plight of the poor and neglected. A Christmas Carol didn’t “invent Christmas,” as it has sometimes been credited, but it laid the groundwork for virtually ever Christmas story written since its publication. Through his Carol (as he referred to it), Dickens articulated what he hoped would be a universal appreciation of Christmas as “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.” The text of A Christmas Carol, as reprinted here, is illustrated with the artwork of Arthur Rackham, from an edition that he produced in 1915.

Many elements from A Christmas Carol trickled down into the work of other writers of Christmas stories. Festivities around the family hearth and dinner table that dot the story appear in “A Country Christmas” by Louisa May Alcott, and the spirit of generosity that the reformed Scrooge shows by the end of Dickens’s tale translates in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Christmas; or, The Good Fairy” and L. M. Montgomery’s “A Christmas Inspiration,” into selfless acts of holiday gift-giving. The full import of holiday gift-giving and the benefits it confers upon those who give and those who receive finds its most heartwarming expression in O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” “the uneventful chronicle,” as the author puts it, “of two foolish children in a flat who unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house”—and who, in doing so, show themselves to be the wisest of all.

Many other traditional Christmas trimmings are on display in these stories. Kate Douglas Wiggins’ The Romance of a Christmas Card, illustrated by Alice Ercle Hunt, shows exactly what its title promises: the emotional impact that a heartfelt greeting on a decorative holiday card can have on those for whom it has special meaning. Sometimes, the paraphernalia of Christmas is as much as source of amusement as enjoyment. In “The Peterkins’ Christmas-Tree,” Lucretia P. Hale writes jollily about an experience known to many Christmas revelers: how to accommodate a Christmas tree that exceeds the size of the spot where it is to be placed. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Christmas Masquerade” is an unusual fairy tale about a Christmas party with an aftermath as fantastic as it is unforeseeable. In the same spirit of Freeman’s story, William Dean Howells’ “Christmas Every Day” presents a hilariously topsy-turvy world that turns inside out the old adage that “Christmas comes but once a year.”

Of course it wouldn’t be Christmas without Santa Claus and in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, illustrated by Mary Cowles Clark, L. Frank Baum gives the full history of Santa’s growth from youth to old age: how he earns a reputation for kindness toward children, invents the first toys, develops the Christmas stocking and tree decorations, and harnesses reindeer to help him deliver gifts by sleigh. Baum wrote this tale in 1902, only two years after writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and this story shows the same freewheeling imagination and disregard for tradition that he used to turn his Oz books into unique modern fairy tales. Santa would actually make a guest appearance in Baum’s Oz series and appear two years later in the sequel A Kidnapped Santa Claus.

Santa is present as well in the book’s best-known poem, Clement Clark Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which in this volume features the illustrations of Arthur Rackham. First published in 1823, Moore’s poem is responsible for much of the mythology that we associate with Santa, from his physical looks to his magic ability to drive a present-laden sleigh drawn by reindeer through the air. The book’s other poems address in miniature many of the same holiday themes explored in the stories: the decorating of the Christmas tree, the hanging of stockings at the fireplace, even the crucial role that Santa’s wife plays in selecting the gifts that Santa delivers. And in “A New-Fashioned Christmas,” Julie M. Lippman goes so far as to speculate—with a wink—a future in which the soulless modernization of the holiday and its festivities make us realize just how lucky we are to embrace our old-fashioned Christmas traditions.

Like presents beneath the tree, the stories and poems in this volume are treats that capture joyful spirit of the Christmas season and glow with the warmth of the holiday fireside. Although dressed in yuletide trappings they offer pleasures that can be enjoyed the whole year round.