How much do you really know about Christmas? Are you looking for something different to read while you sit by the fire? Want to finally win at Christmas Trivia? Delve into these enticing books embracing all the weird and wonderful stories behind the holiday we know today as Christmas.

Inventing Christmas: How Our Holiday Came to Be by Jock Elliot

Christmas has grown from a night to a day to a few days to an entire season. It now evokes certain visual cues, sensory representations, even smells brings with it a flood of images and customs that now epitomize what “happiness with family and friends” means. Author Jock Elliott is Chairman Emeritus of the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather and an avid lover of Christmas. This whimsical and wise tome includes charming nostalgic illustrations by Thomas Nast (who created both the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey) following the invention of the American Santa Claus, which began with a story by Washington Irving and culminated in “The Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore. 

Christmas: The Sacred to Santa by Tara Moore

From feasting and fasting to candy canes, stockings and long forgotten, rare, imported exotic fruits, which we now call oranges. Follow the beginnings of Christmas traditions and even read how early Christians celebrated the birth of Christ. Learn how Christmas is reflected and even repressed in art and culture as Christianity grows into a world religion.

Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December, 1941 by Stanley Weintraub

This book offers a refreshing take on WWII as seen through the lens of Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt’s struggles with entering the US into a global war as set against the backdrop of the holiday season.

Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday by Gerry Bowler

An Anglican priest hands out brass knuckles to his congregation to guard his church from anti-Christmas fanatics. Fascists insist that the real Christmas is the Winter Solstice, while Communists stage atheist musicals outside of churches on Christmas Eve. Activists vandalize shops that set out holiday advertising in October and anti-consumerists sing parody carols in shopping malls. Is there such a thing as a War on Christmas? As Gerry Bowler demonstrates in this entertaining book, there's always has been a war or rather several wars on Christmas.

Christmas: A Candid History by Bruce David Forbes

Did you know: For three centuries Christians did not celebrate Christmas? Puritans in England and New England made Christmas observances illegal? President Franklin Roosevelt changed the date of Thanksgiving in order to lengthen the Christmas shopping season? Coca-Cola helped fashion Santa Claus’s look in an advertising campaign? All this and more make for a fun and quick leisurely read.

Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.

Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!