Christmas around the fire

Christmas is a time for celebrating the birth of Jesus with family and friends, to gather together in sacred and jovial celebration of the Incarnation. Yet in our fast-paced, hyper-digitized lives, we are losing the sense of a good story enjoyed among good friends around a good fire.

In Christmas Around the Fire, Ryan Topping invites us to turn off the television set, put down our devices, quiet ourselves, and gather our loved ones to share some of the best writing (in a variety of forms) about Christmas. Whether or not your family has an actual fireplace around which to gather is not so important, but it helps!

Included within are entries from legendary novelists and poets such as Leo Tolstoy, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Willa Cather, and more. Also included are profound thoughts from great religious figures such as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Pope Saint John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI.

For those who love the true spirit of the ;most wonderful time of the year; and love reading in almost equal measure, Christmas Around the Fire will quickly become a family tradition and the first piece excitedly pulled out of storage every year. This is one of those rarest of books-one around which family memories are made.