Welcome to the tenth day of the Virtual Advent Tour. Today I’m combining our holiday tour with That Artsy Reader Girl’s Top Ten Tuesday meme to share ten Christmas-themed books (spanning all age groups) that I recommend:

1. The Birds’ Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggins: This overly sentimental, melodramatic picture book tells the Victorian Era story of an ill girl, Carol, who invites the neighbor children, The Birds, to her Christmas Day birthday party. I wept buckets over this as a child and teen and would borrow it annually from the library in order to do so.
2. The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg: I first encountered this picture book in a French translation, which we read aloud my senior year of high school. Charming in any language, this story, about a boy who takes a train to the North Pole, ultimately is about faith and believing in the unseen, yet still known. The movie adaptation is also quite good.
3. A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas: This prose piece, a fictionalized memoir about a bygone Christmastime in a Welsh village, was originally written by one of the early 20th-century’s best poets as a radio broadcast. Sentimental without ever becoming sappy, this story is beautiful whether read on the page, listened to as read by its author, or seen performed by actors.
4. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson: I think, although I don’t remember for certain, that I saw a tv adaptation of this first and then discovered the book, but it could have been the other way around. Either way, this middle-grade novel focuses on the Herdmans, a poor family of under-supervised, over-bullying, mean children, who get it into their heads that they want to take over their local Sunday School production of the Nativity play.
5. Greenglass House by Kate Milford: In this fantastical middle-grade novel, a tween boy and his adoptive parents live in an old inn. Just as they’re closing up for the holidays, a series of strangers parade in and a snowstorm descends, and a mystery is set forward.
6. How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss: Converted into one of the 20th-century’s best loved holiday cartoons, this book is just as charming as its televised (and subsequent films) adaptation. In it, a hard-hearted grinch has had it with his neighbors’ over-exuberant merry-making and decides to ruin their holidays in order to get them to shut up about Christmas already.
7. My True Love Gave to Me, edited by Stephanie Perkins: In this series of romantic Christmas tales by some of the biggest stars in YA literature, you’ll find contemporary romances and historical fiction rubbing shoulders with fantasy and sci fi. In other words, there’s a story for everyone.
8. Let It Snow! by John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle: In this interlocking trio of stories/novellas (adapted into a charming Netflix film), a blizzard strikes the mid-Atlantic on Christmas Eve, stranding a train heading to Florida just outside Gracetown, Virginia. Included on the train are a horde of high school cheerleaders headed to a competition and two other solitary teenagers, Jeb and Jubilee. Independently, they all head to the Waffle House they can see from the train window through the night’s snow. The stories are what happens next.
9. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: We all know the bones of the story: a miser is visited by three Christmas spirits who attempt to get him to mend his ways and take a greater interest in his fellow man. But the details of the story often get glossed over in the tv adaptations, and it’s worth a return visit to the source material to see how the Victorian Era’s most beloved social crusader gets his message across.
10. A Redbird Christmas by Fannie Flagg: Typical of Flagg’s quirky small-town-centric novels, this novel focuses on a man who must move to the South for his health and the locals he encounters once he does so.

Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you tomorrow for our next door on the Virtual Advent Tour! (I’m a little behind in matching dates with folks who wrote to me over the weekend, but we do still have a couple openings if today is your first visit to our tour and you want to join in.)