It Wouldn't Be Christmas Without Books

Not the silly seasonal books that some big name authors churn out. I mean short classics that you can read in one sitting while recovering from decorating/shopping/cooking/parties:

A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. Possibly the best beginning of a book ever:

One Christmas was so much like another,
in those years around the sea-town corner
now and out of all sound
except the distant speaking of the voices
I sometimes hear a moment before sleep,
that I can never remember
whether it snowed for six days and six nights
when I was twelve or
whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights
when I was six.

If you have never listened to the recording of Dylan Thomas reading this, you must. BHPL owns this on audiobook. Dylan Thomas' physician when he was in New York, Milton Feltenstein, lived in Free Acres in Berkeley Heights.

Christmas Day in the Morning by Pearl Buck

The story of a farmer's son who has little but finds a way to give his father the best present of his life. It can be read online but the version illustrated by Mark Buehner has beautiful paintings of dark snowy scenes.

A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote.

At libraries you generally have to check out Breakfast With Tiffany's to read this story ever since Modern Library published them in one volume. Six year-old Buddy and the elderly Miss Sook make fruitcakes for their friends out of moonshine and some pecans they gathered themselves.

Do you have a favorite holiday book that you read every year?