Whether you celebrate Christmas, Kwanzaa, or Hanukkah or just want to skip straight to New Year’s Eve, there’s always a book out there to help you get in the holiday spirit. Here are five must-read books about the holidays for adults, teenagers, and children.
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens’s beloved tale of the Christmas spirit is beautifully presented in this deluxe new illustrated edition. Contemporary artist and illustrator Yelena Bryksenkova has created enchanting artwork to accompany Dickens’s classic story by Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Gorgeous watercolors evoke the magic of Victorian Christmas while simultaneously infusing this timeless text with a touch of modern-day whimsy. With gilded page edges and a satin ribbon marker, this lavish keepsake volume is tomorrow’s cherished family heirloom – an essential holiday treasure to read year after year around the fire or with the plum pudding.
- Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
16-year-old Lily has left a red notebook full of challenges on her favorite bookstore shelf, waiting for just the right guy to come along and accept its dares. Dash, in a bad mood during the holidays, happens to be the first guy to pick up the notebook and rise to its challenges. What follows is a whirlwind romance as Dash and Lily trade dreams, dares, and desires in the notebook they pass back and forth at locations all across New York City. But can their in-person selves possibly connect as well as their notebook versions, or will their scavenger hunt end in a comic mismatch of disastrous proportions?
- One Day in December by Josie Silver
Laurie is pretty sure love, at first sight, doesn’t exist anywhere but in the movies. But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy December day, she sees a man who she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there’s a moment of pure magic…and then her bus drives away. Certain they’re fated to find each other again, Laurie spends a year scanning every bus stop and cafe in London for him. But she doesn’t find him, not when it matters anyway. Instead, they “reunite” at a Christmas party when her best friend Sarah giddily introduces her new boyfriend to Laurie. It’s Jack, the man from the bus. What follows for Laurie, Sarah and Jack is ten years of friendship, heartbreak, missed opportunities, roads not taken, and destinies reconsidered. One Day in December is a joyous, heartwarming, and immensely moving love story to escape into and a reminder that fate takes inexplicable turns along the route to happiness.
- A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote
First published in 1956, this much sought-after autobiographical recollection of Truman Capote’s rural Alabama boyhood has become a modern-day classic. This book is warm and delicately illustrated and has been called “a tiny gem of a holiday story” by the School Library Journal, starred review. Seven-year-old Buddy inaugurates the Christmas season by crying out to his cousin, Miss Sook Falk, “It’s fruitcake weather!” Thus begins an unforgettable portrait of an odd but enduring friendship between two innocent souls – one young and one old – and the memories they share of beloved holiday traditions.
- Skipping Christmas by John Grisham
Imagine a year without Christmas. No crowded shops, no corny office parties, no fruitcakes, and no unwanted presents. That’s just what Luther and Nora Krank have in mind when they decide that, just this once, they’ll skip the holiday altogether. Theirs will be the only house on the street without a rooftop Frosty the snowman; won’t be hosting their annual Christmas Eve bash; they aren’t even going to have a tree. They won’t need one because come December 25; they’re setting sail on a Caribbean cruise. But, as this weary couple is about to discover, skipping Christmas brings enormous consequences – and isn’t half as easy as they’d imagined. A classic tale for modern times, Skipping Christmas offers a hilarious look at the chaos and frenzy that has become a part of our holiday tradition.
