What do you read in the run up to Christmas?

[bedelia]

I love to read wintry and festive books at this time of year, so looking for recommendations.

Things like The Box of Delights, The Nutcracker, or ghost stories with a cold-weather/festive theme (just finished reading The Silent Companions, which was wonderful!).

I could be tempted by some non-fiction too. I'm love to get Nigel Slater's Christmas Chronicles, though it does come with a rather hefty price tag. Does anyone have this, or could recommend something similar?

What do you all enjoy in the run up to Christmas?

Winter solstice is lovely.

I also like Maeve Binchy and Adrian Mole -they aren't Christmas novels but love their descriptions of Christmas.

I read The Snow Child last year and looking for something as good...

I always read The Box of Delights, and also The Dark is Rising. I love the christmassy feel of The Children of Green Knowe as well

The Dark is Rising, every year without fail. This year I’m also looking forward to reading Lucy and Tom’s Christmas to DD.

Last year I read The Snow Child( loved it), Winter Ghosts by Kate Moss,PD James Mistletoe Murders,The Snow Garden by Rachel Joyce and Poirots Christmas.

This year I'm planning on the new PDJames collection Sleep No More( set at Christmas),Michelle Paver's Dark Matter and Thin Air,Louise Penny's Dead Cold(set at Christmas), The Scandal and My Grandmother..... both by Frederick Backman. Will also dip into some Susan Hill short stories and a couple of Christmas short story books I got sent last Christmas ( Murder Under the Christmas Tree and Crimson Snow).... and anything else good I discover.😀

Op, I just picked up the Nigel Slater in Sainsbury's for £11 which is a bargain compared to the enormous rrp. It looks a lovely book, I'm waiting for Dh to take the pesky kids out at the weekend so I can snuggle up and read it. I tend to read familiar books from childhood in winter, Ballet Shoes and The Painted Garden are my favourites, and I think both have Christmassy bits in them.

A Christmas Carol and the other Dickens Christmas stories.

I’ve also bought The Christmas Biography by Judith Flanders which I’m looking forward to this year.

The Dark is Rising for me too!

They're both classed as children's books but the Christmas mystery by jostein garder and also a book called lost Christmas. Oh and the Christmas mouse by miss read

Wow, thank you all for the recommendations! Last year I read The Dark is Rising, The Giant under the Snow, Tom's Midnight Garden, Moondial (they're not Christmassy, but have that same sort of "feel" for me). Another I really really want to re-read (from my childhood) is Ally Ally Aster, but as yet I've not been able to find a copy!

Delila I read most of The Christmas Mystery with DD as an advent bedtime story, but she kept falling asleep and I didn't want to read ahead without her. I'll try again this year

Sloane thank you so much for letting me know about the Slater book in Sainsbury's! I shall head over today and hope I can find a copy. I could order from Amazon as it's not much more, but there's something about feeling a book in your hands before purchasing...

I may try Winter Solstice. It's probably not the type of book I would normally go for, but I recently read How to find love in a Bookstore (found for 50p in the Sainsburys cafe) and rather enjoyed it by the end. It's set in the run-up to Christmas, and is rather soppy but nice nonetheless

Always read The Lion the witch and the wardrobe. Also The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder. There are 24 chapters, read one a day through advent. It’s like a book advent calendar!

Picked up my Nigel Slater from Sainsbury's today,I love his recipes. Asda had it too. Little House in the Big Woods has a lovely Christmas chapter too. I used to read it to my dc every year when they'd let me.😂

The Dark is Rising, always. Also last year The Children of Green Knowe, because of the magical bit where the woman sings a lullaby to the long ago baby.

It only takes a few minutes but each Christmas I find a quiet moment to read Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales.

A children's book but Arthur Ransome's Winter Holiday has lots of snow and ice in it, although it's set just after Christmas.

There is also a brilliant Michael Morpurgo book about at letter Home from the trenches the name of which escapes me. It is a about the game of football in no man’s land in 1914.

The Dark is Rising for me too,it is just such a fantastic description of the run up to Christmas,and captures an English winter so well ( well,until all the snow!!).Fantastic in other ways too.
And The Children of Green Knowe - though we have on DVD-copied-from-video the BBC adaption of that,and we watch it every Christmas,one of our family traditions.
I love Elisabeth Goudge too - The Herb of Grace,or Sister of the Angels for preference.
For light relief Barbara Robinson's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
And I want to read Jeanette Wintersons book,which no one got for me last year despite my heavy hints
I think I need to start reading now.....

Really really cheesy but: All of Jenny Colgan's Christmas books! Christmas at the Cupcake Cafe, Christmas at the Little Beach Street Bakery, various others...

They're such light-hearted reads, really really easy to just snuggle up with in a blanket and relax to.

Yy to The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. I read it to the kids every year, a chapter a night, and each year they have got more of the jokes.

I love to read The Silver Chair. It’s quite a harrowing journey but there’s a lovely pay off.

On Christmas Night or Boxing Day Dh and I love to listen to the Sherlock Holmes short story The Blue Carbuncle on audiobook. We always get a bit “there must be something in my eye” at the end.

In the week before Christmas my dad (who was a huge Dickens fan) used to read A Christmas Carol to us before we went to bed, finishing on Christmas Eve. So I always try to read that

I don't have small children any longer but I still read The Thirteen Days of Christmas and Alison Uttley's Stories for Christmas. Oh, and The Tailor of Gloucester.

I haven't read A Child's Christmas in Wales for quite a while MiddlingMum I must find my copy and read that too, this year.

And I love with both Winter Solstice and The Blue Carbuncle which, along with Silver Blaze, is probably my favourite Sherlock Holmes story.

Haven't read some of the other books mentioned so I'm going to get a copy of The Dark is Rising which I feel I really should have read by now and a few others and give them a go.

I probably won't get much else done this year by the look of it.

What a beautiful thread!

I love all the Susan Cooper love!

I read the Grey King last Hallowe'en - I'd started reciting:
"On the Day of the Dead when the year too dies,
Must the youngest open the oldest hills"
a week or so before, just randomly, and decided it was a sign. Really should read the whole Sequence again.

Will definitely take some ideas from this thread.

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett.

If you want to use the run-up to Christmas [wasn't that once called the season of Advent?] then some suitably wintry reading would be meditations on the Four Last Things - Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven.

Definitely The Dark is Rising, and this year I'm planning to reread The Golden Compass, which feels wintery and christmassy to me although I've no idea why!