For over thirty years, Joseph Bottum has been writing widely acclaimed Christmas essays, columns, short stories, and carols for American magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, St. Augustine’s Press has gathered a selection of these classic pieces—with a vast range across the Christmas spectrum.  There’s the comic: “Tinsel. No one needs tinsel. Even the word is a tinselly kind of word.” There’s the sentimental: “Her hair was the same thin shade of gray as the weather-beaten pickets of the fence around her frozen garden.” There’s the reminiscent: “Christmas was books, and books Christmas, in those days now mostly washed down to the cold sea.” Along the way, there’s the theological, the learned, the mystical, and the musical. “Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art,” he writes in praise of mad and cluttered holidays. “Christmas will not be defined by our failures to apply its lessons and carols,” he explains about Yuletide poetry. To see these essays and short stories gathered in one place—in a beautiful illustrated edition from St. Augustine’s Press—is to see the whole of the vision that Joseph Bottum has been painting for decades: a picture of Christmas as a thin place in the wall between the natural and the numinous, where a burning grace slips into a cold winter world. Characters who live. Dialogue so real you’ll feel you could talk to these people yourself. Prose that proves both serenely unpretentious and utterly exquisite. And the truth. The  truth . Joseph Bottum has produced the most enjoyable Christmas stories you’ll ever read—and the most moving. —Peter Robinson, host of  Uncommon Knowledge  and former speechwriter to President Reagan    Wit, wisdom, pristine prose, and Christmas. What else can you ask for? This book is bliss. —Andrew Klavan, author of  The Truth and Beauty  and host of  The Andrew Klavan Show  podcast What a Christmas present! Allegorical, humorous stories of hapless, affable gangsters, like the sarcastic tales of Damon Runyon, are counterweighted by moving reflections on Christmas in youth and adulthood, where, despite distractions, the season is still miraculous, tangible, and effective. I loved it. —Ron Hansen, author of  Atticus  and  Mariette in Ecstasy   One of America’s most gifted writers, with a perfect ear and a matchless style.  — Andrew Ferguson, author of  Land of Lincoln  and  Crazy U Joseph Bottum’s name would be mandatory on any objective short list of American public intellectuals. . . . He has the head of Christopher Lasch and the heart of Flannery O’Connor. —Mary Eberstadt, author of  How the West Really Lost God  and  Adam and Eve After the Pill   Joseph Bottum is one of the nation’s most widely ranging thinkers, with hundreds of essays, reviews, poems, and short stories in publications from the Atlantic to the Washington Post . His books include the sociological study, An Anxious Age, and Christopher Award-winning children’s verse. his popular writing extends to obituaries in The Times of London and #1- bestselling sports essays in Amazon’s Kindle singles series, with lyrics performed by singers from Nashville to Carnegie Hall. A native of South Dakota, Bottum lives in the Black Hills, where he writes on literature, philosophy, and the American condition.