This is a beautifully-produced book for a general, seasonal readership – the season of its subject. It is, in other words, a book to give and receive at Christmas, to read during Christmas, and very likely to pack away with the other decorations, forgotten for the rest of the year. Despite the back cover categorising it as ‘history’, this is more a compendium of facts, myths, beliefs and stories concerning Christmas past and present, structured around loose themes, with little resembling an argument. The church historian may as well pass over the first chapter on ‘The original Christmas’, as the treatment of the Gospels as straight-forward accounts of events uncomplicated by theology will likely frustrate more than illuminate. ‘Early celebrations and customs’ holds out more promise, until it is realised that ‘early’ means up to the eighteenth century. Still, there are some striking past practices related here, demonstrating how the Feast of the Nativity intermingled with Roman and Norse festivals, and has maintained blurred boundaries ever since. The apparent incongruity of today's dissolute office Christmas party beside Church celebrations may be reconsidered upon learning of the Scandinavian variant on boy bishops: a Christmas ‘faux bishop had the power temporarily to marry people. The marriages lasted for one night’ (p. 40). The chapter on Christmas in art and culture covers its ground at break-neck speed, moving from Roman sarcophagi to Rembrandt, and from Dickens to Dr Seuss in a matter of pages, though the colour images within the text go some way to compensate. Protestant qualms and secularist state insecurities about Christmas are narrated in ‘Christmas outlawed’, with some themes explored here notably re-appearing in later discussions of the commercialising of Christmas and, in the final chapter, the Church and Christmas. A thought-provoking insight across these chapters is the repeated role of the German Christmas in dissolving the boundaries between once rigidly-opposed ideas of the festival, so generating a ubiquitous kind of Christmas. There seems something in the German nexus of Protestant and Catholic cultures, rooted in pagan memory yet framed by a concern for commerce and productivity, which has generated a powerful solvent deleterious both to Puritan objections to Christmas in the British Isles and North America, and to Roman Catholic norms further south. An Anglican via media on Christmas is also recognised, leading to ‘the German and English Christmases’ now dominating ‘the imported global Christmas’ (p. 167). Much of this book is derivative from more scholarly studies of Christmas, but, as the referencing is clear, the opportunity exists for following threads back to their sources. To this extent, the book may have some use for readers of this Journal. Then again, Christmas has surely never been about utility. And this is despite the founding – as early as 1912 – of ‘the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving’ (p. 140).