Literary Christmas traditions have been around for a while – in Victorian times writing and distributing stories and poems to friends and family as Christmas gifts was a popular practice, while in Iceland many families exchange book gifts on Christmas Eve as part of a tradition called Jólabókaflóð (Christmas book flood), which officially began in 1944.
In my family we receive “boxing day books”, a tradition started by my grandad, who used to buy everyone a book to open on the evening of the 26th, as one last treat just as the festivities are winding down.
Poet Michael Rosen remembers his parents reading him The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter every Christmas. “I have a memory of trying to do the same with my children, but it fell completely flat,” he says.
Writer and performer Roxy Dunn, whose first novel As Young as This is due out next year, has a family poetry tradition, too. “Every December, for as long as I can remember, my mother sticks a poster of the poem, ’Twas the Night Before Christmas on the toilet door. There was a time when I could recite the whole thing,” she says. At the moment she can only manage the first two verses of 14, “but when I go back to my parents’ house over Christmas, I’ll be refreshing my memory and seeing if I can memorise it all by the time I leave”, she says. “I don’t normally like rhyming poems but find this one so nostalgic and comforting.”
Writer Eley Williams also turns to poetry at Christmastime. “Each year I try to ensure I find my copy of the late Bernadette Mayer’s book-length work Midwinter Day before the season’s solstice”, she says. “Centring on a waking and dreaming 24hrs-in-the-life of the poem’s speaker, it’s a crisp dazzle of a text, as strange and tender as this time of the year deserves.” This year the Poetry State Forest project has organised an online event on Solstice Saturday, 21 December, when participants will be able to hear the book being read in real-time by various people, raising money for the renovation of Mayer’s former home.
For novelist Jo Hamya, Christmas is “ideal for big books, usually classics.” This year, her choice is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
“I think of it more as an unconscious habit than a ritual, but it started with Anna Karenina when I was 15 or so. Time stands still during the last week of December. No one’s emailing you and there’s nowhere to go, which induces the kind of sequestered, cosseted feeling you need to read 800 pages from start to finish with genuine pleasure,” she says.
Of all the classics, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is probably the most popular book to read at this time of year. “Sometimes, the obvious choices are obvious for a reason,” says Ferdia Lennon, whose first novel Glorious Exploits won both the Waterstones debut fiction prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction this year. He often reads the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge in December, after first picking it up a week before Christmas 10 years ago. “To be honest, I was feeling none too excited about the whole thing. Never having read any Dickens, I chose the book rather defiantly, almost willing it to be a disappointment. Bah humbug. Then, the first line. ‘Marley was dead: to begin with.’ Not bad, I grudgingly admitted,” he says. “By the end of the chapter, I was enjoying myself so much that I wanted to share it with someone and read it to my wife. She asked me to keep going, and so it happened that in the run-up to Christmas, I would read her a chapter a day until the book was done and a curious thing occurred. I actually began to be excited for Christmas again.”
Marley’s ghost appearing to Scrooge in an illustration for A Christmas Carol. Photograph: UniversalImagesGroup/Getty Images
