A Christmas Carol is pretty well unavoidable around now, with Little Women trailing somewhat behind. There’s no shortage of alternative literary Christmases among the classics, however, often less sweetly heartwarming and more invigoratingly grumpy. Nigel Molesworth, it will be remembered, foiled all attempts to inflict A Christmas Carol on him. ‘It is just that there is something about the Xmas Carol which makes paters and grown-ups read with grate XPRESION, and this is very embarassing [sic] for all.’ For the Molesworths among us, there are plenty of alternatives to be had.

Sometimes these are depictions of Christmas where no Christmas should be occurring. Arnold Bennett’s sublime The Old Wives’ Tale follows up the miserable, harmonium-playing Christmases of his heroine Sophia’s youth with an unforgettable Christmas lunch in her Paris exile. It is 1870; the city is under siege, and ‘a butcher in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré has bought the three elephants of the Jardin des Plantes for 27,000 francs’. Sophia is not eating elephant; a restaurant has produced a lunch for her of exquisite French perfection, roast duck, ‘a quite little salad’, champagne, a perfect brie. Even the table is rapturously specified – ‘a salt-cellar, out of which one ground rock-salt by turning a handle, a pepper-castor, two knife-rests, and two common tumblers’. Irresistible.

Christmas is celebrated in still more unlikely places. Henry Williamson’s long novel sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight has never been admired by more than a tiny cult, but at its best provides some exceptional witness accounts to history.........

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