Some short Christmas reads

Not too short, not too long, something just right

There are umpteen books set at Christmas and an equal umpteen number of volumes of Christmassy extracts (the British Libary’s A Literary Christmas: An Anthology is one I’d recommend). Here are some suggestions if you want something in between Samuel Pepys and The Box of Delights.

If you’re not planning on heading to church this yule but still want a dose of religion, then I strongly recommend The Second Shepherds’ Play. It’s a short medieval mystery play and the version that has come down to us is from the Wakefield Cycle. The first, and largest, section of the action focuses on a group of shepherds who are up in the fields tending their flock one wintry night. It’s a kind of 15th century pantomime that involves sheep rustling, before the shepherds are then called to a rather more important appointment…

One way to go is only read the Christmas bits from books you’ve already consumed so that there’s no self-induced plot spoiling. A slightly unusual one would be the section of The Fellowship of the Ring when the merry band of brothers converge on Rivendell. Since they set out on their quest from the Last Homely House on December 25, that means they’ve been hanging out together throughout Advent.

Next, two short stories. First Stella Gibbons’ Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm. You really need to read her original comic classic Cold Comfort Farm novel first to appreciate it, but this is a a real treat of a prequel that starts: “It was Christmas Eve. Dusk, a filthy mantle, lay over Sussex when the Reverend Silas Hearsay, Vicar of Howling, set out to pay his yearly visit to Cold Comfort Farm.”

And then (pictured top illustrated by Sidney Paget in 1892) The Blue Carbuncle by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a lighter Sherlock Holmes short story featuring a lost gem and a Christmas goose. “Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles,” is how Holmes describes it.

One of my favourite writers is Garrison Keillor. His breakthrough book, the quasi history/memoir Lake Wobegon Days, has a lovely section called Winter which is mostly set at Christmas, including a not entirely successful visit to church on Christmas Eve, some gently romantic ice skating, and a Christmas pageant.

The first two essays in Village Christmas, a collection of pieces by Laurie Lee, are Village Christmas itself and A Cold Christmas Walk in the Country. Both are delightfully Cider With Rosie-ish.

Finally, the longest in this list is the short 1816 novella Headlong Hall by Thomas Love Peacock. Visitors arrive at Squire Headlong’s eponymous home and there’s various Christmas high jinks and philosophising in a kind of humorous Candide style. It contains one of my favourite quotes indicating the host’s busy schedule: “Squire Headlong, in the mean while, was quadripartite in his locality.”

I’ll leave you with this by Anthony Powell from The Acceptance World, the third in his A Dance to the Music of Time series, since he was born on the winter solstice, December 21, 1905.

“It was that prolonged, flat, cheerless week that follows Christmas. My own existence seemed infinitely stagnant, relieved only by work on another book. Those interminable latter days of the dying year create an interval, as it were, of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic. Imminent change of direction is for some reason often foreshadowed by such colourless patches of time.”

I am planning to reread (and post monthly about) all 12 volumes of The Dance in 2025 and hope some of you might join me, more details of which in the last post of the year. Next week, I’ll list what I read and enjoyed in 2024.