15 Classic Christmas Stories to Read Free Online
Almost every Christmas story worth reading was written between 1823 and 1920, which means almost every Christmas story worth reading is public domain and free. Most of them are also short — an evening, or a single sitting after the house has gone quiet.
Here are fifteen, from the two everybody knows to several that deserve to be better known.
The two that invented the modern Christmas
A Christmas Carol (1843) — Dickens did not invent Christmas, but he fixed its emotional shape: the family table, the reclaimed miser, the obligation of the comfortable to the poor. Read it rather than watching it. It is ninety minutes long, it is funnier than any adaptation admits, and the Ghost of Christmas Present's speech about "surplus population" is the most direct political sentence he ever wrote. The library also holds the fuller 1865 printing, A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.
The Gift of the Magi (1905) — O. Henry, and about twelve pages. You know the ending and it still works, because the story is not really about the twist; it is about two people being poor in a way that is described exactly.
Dickens's other Christmas books
He wrote a Christmas book almost every year for a decade, and the later ones are stranger than the Carol.
- The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) — a domestic misunderstanding with a cricket as household god. Sentimental in a way that was hugely popular then and reads oddly now, and the toy-maker Caleb Plummer is one of his real inventions.
- The Magic Fishbone — Dickens writing a fairy tale in the voice of a seven-year-old girl, complete with her opinions about her father the King. Twenty pages and very funny.
Santa Claus, properly
The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902) — L. Frank Baum, and the best thing on this list nobody has read. It is a full mythology: Claus is a foundling raised by immortals in the Forest of Burzee, invents toymaking, is opposed by the Awgwas, and at the end the Council of the Immortals votes on whether to give him the Mantle of Immortality. It takes the question "what would it actually mean for one person to do this forever" completely seriously.
A Kidnapped Santa Claus (1904) — a short story in the same world. The Daemons of the Caves — Selfishness, Envy, Hatred, Malice and Repentance — take Santa on Christmas Eve, and his four assistants have to finish the round without him.
The Victorian and Edwardian favourites
- The Birds' Christmas Carol (1887) — Kate Douglas Wiggin. A girl born on Christmas Day, chronically ill, who arranges a dinner for the nine children of the poor family next door. It was a bestseller for forty years and it earns its ending more honestly than its reputation suggests. Also in the library as Birds' Christmas Carol.
- A Christmas Greeting — Hans Christian Andersen's Christmas collection. Andersen at Christmas is not cosy: this is the author of The Little Match Girl.
- A Little Book for Christmas (1915) — Cyrus Townsend Brady, five short stories. The first, about a bank clerk and a stolen doll, is much better than the book's obscurity suggests.
- Peace on Earth, Good-Will to Dogs — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, a Christmas Eve story about a woman, a great many dogs, and a man who arrives with the wrong expectations. Genuinely odd and genuinely charming.
- The Brownies and Other Tales — Juliana Horatia Ewing. The title story is where Baden-Powell got the name for the junior Guides, and it is a Christmas-adjacent story about two boys who discover the brownie doing the housework is meant to be them.
Christmas inside a longer children's book
If you want a Christmas chapter rather than a Christmas book, these are series volumes built around the holiday.
- The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation — Annie Fellows Johnston, and the most purely comfortable book on this page.
- The Curlytops and Their Playmates — a winter of sledging and snow-houses for the youngest readers here.
- The Camp Fire Girls Solve a Mystery — a Christmas adventure at camp, and the only mystery on the list.
- Patty's Success — Carolyn Wells. Not a Christmas book, but its best sequence is one, and Patty is very good company.
What to read tonight
Half an hour: The Gift of the Magi. One evening: A Christmas Carol. Something you have never read before: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus.
All of these are public domain and free to read in the browser on BingeReaders — nothing to install, no account needed to start a chapter. There are 12 Christmas stories and 9 more books filed under Christmas in the library, and if you want something equally short but not seasonal, our guide to classics you can finish in one sitting is the next stop.