All ages will relish this handsome Christmas collection of more than eighty poems, stories, letters, and memoirs brimming with the joyful spirit of the holiday season. Gathered in this compact volume are selections from many sources, some depicting the mystery of the Nativity, others the well-loved traditions of feasting, carol singing, and bell ringing, and still others Christmas as experienced by people living far away and long ago.

Among the offerings are a chapter, "Ramona and the Three Wise Persons," from Beverly Cleary's Ramona and Her Father; poems by such diverse masters as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ogden Nash, Donald Hall, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; a selection by Kenneth Grahame from The Wind in the Willows; and an excerpt from Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. There are old favorites such as Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Tennyson's "The Merry Bells of Yule," as well as an American journalist's account from strife-torn San Salvador and several of Samuel Pepys's diary entries, recording Christmas celebrations and festivities in seventeenth-century London.

With wonderful, rich illustrations to complement the carefully selected texts, this is a book for the entire family to treasure year after year.