Diana Secker Tesdell [Ed.]

Another Christmas book, dammit

Think you’ve heard it all? Every tiny reindeer named, every Grinch ungrinched, all the ho-ho-hum holiday stories tediously read, recited, re-recited, the classics on a constant loop? Maybe not. Here are 20 Christmas tales, from Tolstoy to Richard Ford, as fresh as a Christmas Eve snowfall.

Nikolai Gogol gives us a devil who meets his match in a good blacksmith. (Gogol, joining Chekhov, Tolstoy and Nabokov in this collection, might lead one to wonder how Russia ever fostered ‘godless’ communism.) There’s a Dickens dress rehearsal for “A Christmas Carol,” though this Scrooge, a gravedigger, is sadly unredeemed. There’s a selection of Trollope’s too, though none from a street corner.

The Truman Capote classic “A Christmas Memory” is likely this volume’s most familiar work, but it’s a story that deserves to be read every holiday season, no matter your faith. If you only know Capote from a movie script, read this short, beautiful work aloud. If there’s not a catch in your throat by the end, you have coal in your stocking.