• Christmas and Christmas Lore, T.G. Crippen
Another book with no mentions of media Christmas since it was published in 1928. It is referenced in Bill Bryson's I'm a Strange Here Myself as "scholarly and ageless," and indeed it is a fascinating history of Yuletide lore as seen eighty years ago in Great Britain and Ireland. The customs span Advent through Epiphany, even touching on "Old Christmas." Worth finding used if one can find an affordable copy.
• Happy Christmas, compiled by William Kean Seymour and John Smith
I was disappointed in this British-published book; perhaps the small entries entries were seen as useful as nightly reading before Christmas, but they are too short to be satisfying. Beatrix Potter's charming "Tailor of Gloucester" (which is printed whole in the book following) is reduced to one page about Simpkin the cat's guilt along with a drawing, and Graham's "Dulce Domum" is heavily edited.
• A New Christmas Treasury, edited by Jack Newcombe
I wouldn't mind getting my own copy of this outstanding anthology. Standards like Andersen's "The Fir Tree," Bret Harte's "How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar," and of course "The Gift of the Magi" are included, plus there are familiarities like Irving's "Christmas Eve," Capote's "A Christmas Memory," Kenneth Graham's "Dulce Domum" (in its entirety rather than abridged as in Happy Christmas), and F. Van Wyck Mason's "Valley Forge: 24 December 1777," but this crammed-full volume includes modern, unusual entries like Cleveland Amory's "Rescue" and George Plimpton's "Christmas Bird Count," a Christmas short story mystery, "The Murder of Santa Claus," by P.D. James, the Christmas chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, and other less-anthologized Yuletide pieces. Some hitherto unknown stories of interest: an outcast white boy shows shows the Christmas spirit to a black traveler in segregated Capetown in "A Christmas Dinner" and Ring Lardner's absolutely heartbreaking "Old Folks' Christmas," about a 1920s couple who shower their college-age children with everything and are rewarded with indifference.
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