Would you want these under your Christmas tree?... Photograph: Garry Weaser
As well as curling up with a glass of Baileys, circling films we'll never watch and experiencing acute financial panic, another best-loved activity come Christmas is sitting down to a good read. And along with the new titles we hope we'll be unwrapping, most of us have a favourite Christmas book to get us in the mood.
The fairy on top of the tree is still Charles Dickens, whose A Christmas Carol (1843) remains the best of festive reads. But this is only the most famous of over 20 seasonal tales that flowed from his pen, and readers looking for something different may wish to sample The Chimes or The Cricket on the Hearth. For those who are only familiar with film adaptations, it's also worth seeking out the original Christmas Carol and enjoying the Dickensian darkness among all the blessings: "Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar."
Other great Victorian Christmases include Tom Tulliver's homecoming in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), in which, "Fine old Christmas, with snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and colour with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow." Anthony Trollope was another author of annual Christmas stories, including Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage (1870) and Christmas at Thompson Hall (1876). His own feelings for the mini-genre could be less than rosy, however: "Alas! At this very moment I have one to write, which I have promised to supply within three weeks of this time... as to which I have in vain been cudgelling my brain for the last month. I can't send away the order to another shop, but I do not know how I shall ever get the coffin made."
As in the case of Dickens, Christmas is also a time when boundaries between children's and adult fiction become more than usually relaxed. Many of the most popular Christmas reads are children's books, including CS Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1949), in which a long-delayed Christmas finally arrives in Narnia, and Susan Cooper's epic sequence The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), in which a young boy first discovers his extraordinary powers at Christmas time.
The child's experience of Christmas is also the source of some of the best adult writing about the festive season. One of the greatest is Dylan Thomas's rhapsodic account of his own experiences, A Child's Christmas in Wales, which ends, "Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-coloured snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."
Alongside the novelists, no Christmas would be complete without a little poetry, whether it's Clement Clarke Moore's 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, with its "visions of sugar plums" dancing through children's heads, or Robert Frost's Christmas Trees, in which a stranger arrives at the poet's house and asks "if I would sell my Christmas trees".
And for those seeking a little sharpness among their Christmas fare, the stories of Saki will not disappoint. Here's his hero Reginald ruminating on one of the eternal problems of the season (1904):
"Personally, I can't see where the difficulty in choosing suitable presents lies. No boy who had brought himself up properly could fail to appreciate one of those decorative bottles of liqueurs that are so reverently staged in Morel's window - and it wouldn't in the least matter if one did get duplicates... People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die."
Prose or poem, hearty fare or sharp antacid, what's your favourite Christmas read?
