An anthology of favorite and little-known stories, memoirs, sketches, and poems by American and European masters, past and present, captures all the pleasures of Christmas as celebrated in different times and places.

This eclectic mix of 89 short stories, essays, excerpts and poems highlights the religious and secular elements of the Christmas season. Traditional tales include selections Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Edna Lewis's fond childhood memories of rich holiday food, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's description of a frontier Christmas -- fraught with hardship but redeemed by a cheerful celebration.

Less conventional offerings appear as well: George Plimpton's delightful piece about intensely competitive birdwatchers who hold a Christmas "bird count"; Arthur C. Clarke contends that the Star of Bethlehem may have been a supernova; P. D. James introduces a conniving, potentially lethal family who spend Christmas Eve with a hard-to-love uncle. Such notables as John Cheever, M.F.K. Fisher, Shirley Jackson and Peter Matthiessen are also represented.

Newcombe, who edited Viking's original A Christmas Treasury, juxtaposes the contemporary and the old-fashioned, the heartwarming and the unsentimental in a collection suitable for virtually all literary tastes.