Christmas, for Christians, is primarily about our only true home, which is to be found in Heaven, the gates of which were opened by the coming of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
By Joseph Pearce
Crisis Magazine
December 25, 2025
There's no place like home for the holidays. So sang Perry Como in the popular Christmas hit of 1954, and so sings Perry Como and numerous other singers every year on countless "holiday" channels on the radio throughout the Advent season, right through until the advent of Christmas itself.
Home-for many people, Christmas is all about home and the love of home. This is true of Christians as well as non-Christians. The difference is that Christmas, for Christians, is primarily about our only true home, which is to be found in Heaven, the gates of which were opened by the coming of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But it's about our earthly homes as well as our heavenly home, about our own families as well as the Holy Family.
Our earthly homes are earthy, grounded. They are where real families are found, the place where familiarity breeds contentment. In this very real sense, home is not simply where the heart is but where the hearth is also. This is why Christmas evokes visions of chestnuts roasting on an open fire, to pluck the opening words from a popular song originally recorded by Nat King Cole in 1946. This is why I'll be snuggling close to the tree tomorrow with Christmas Around the Fire, a delightful selection of seasonal stories, essays, and poems selected by Ryan N.S. Topping and published by TAN Books in a handsome red retro-feel hardcover gift edition.
For those who don't know Dr. Topping, he is a philosopher and theologian who founded the Institute for Catholic Cultural Renewal in his native Canada and is the author of several excellent books on authentic Catholic education. He and his wife are the parents of 10 children, which means that he knows a great deal about the meaning of an authentic hearthside Christmas.
Christmas Around the Fire is divided into two parts. The first part is a selection of stories, whereas the second part consists of essays and poems. The book begins ad orientem, not liturgically but geographically, with a timely reminder that Christmas is celebrated in Christendom's East as well as its West. In "Papa Panov's Special Christmas," Leo Tolstoy tells the story of a poor shoemaker in a Russian village who has a mystical dream vision of Christ on Christmas Eve and how the mystical dream becomes a mystical visitation on Christmas Day.
And speaking of mystical visitations, it comes as no surprise that an excerpt from Dickens' A Christmas Carol is included, specifically the visitation of the Spirit of Christmas Past. Who could quibble with such a selection ? Surely it would take a soul as mean-spirited and curmudgeonly as Scrooge himself to question the decorum of a Dickensian presence in a volume such as this. If one were minded to quibble, it would be with Dr. Topping's selection of Chesterton's short story "The Modern Scrooge" instead of "The Shop of Ghosts," the latter of which is much better (me judice).
I was especially taken with "The First Christmas Tree," with which I was unfamiliar. Henry van Dyke's depiction of St. Boniface, the Englishman who converted the pagan Germans to Christ, is hagiographical in the best sense of the word, which is to say that it isn't hagiographical at all. By way of explanation, most hagiographies are so saccharine, so sickly sweet, that the saint is seen as sinless, as immaculate as the Blessed Virgin, pure and faultless from birth, seemingly incapable of sinning.
Such sweetness, all frosting and no cake, might be fine for small children who are not able to digest meatier fare, but it will hardly satisfy the spiritual appetite of those who are grown up enough to be trying to become saints themselves. By way of refreshing contrast, Henry van Dyke's literary retelling of the legend of how the saint gave us the first ever Christmas tree is as feisty as it is festive, showing us a real flesh and blood warrior for Christ, not a painted "Nutcracker" soldier.
Other stories selected by Dr. Topping include Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant" and Willa Cather's "The Burglar's Christmas," as well as an excerpt from a medieval mystery play, the last of which was as welcome as it was unexpected.
As for the second part of this heartwarming and hearth-hugging volume, it weaves poetry and prose, in the sense that it interweaves essays on the Christmas season by such eminenti as St. John Henry Newman and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI with poetry by Ben Jonson, George MacDonald, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and G.K. Chesterton. My favorite of the selected poems is "The Burning Babe" by the English Jesuit martyr St. Robert Southwell, who wrote several other Nativity-inspired poems in praise of the Christ Child which also might have been included. As for the cream of the crop of the selected essays, it can only be "A Remaining Christmas" by Hilaire Belloc, the great writer's evocation of timeless tradition as being at the very heart of the celebration of Christmas.
In opening the pages of Christmas Around the Fire, we are opening our hearts and homes to the spirits of Christmas Past. May we all be haunted by these holy ghosts, and may they spirit us to the manger this Christmas morning.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.
Joseph Pearce is Visiting Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University and a Visiting Fellow of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, New Hampshire). The author of over thirty books, he is editor of the St. Austin Review, series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, senior instructor with Homeschool Connections, and senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative and Crisis Magazine. His personal website is http://www.jpearce.co.