Michael Dirda runs through some of his favorites:
For years, publishers brought out an Agatha Christie whodunit just in time for holiday gift-giving and, one assumes, post-holiday reading. But all sorts of genre writers have traded on the association of Christmas with cozy chills, Dickens being the pioneer and the story of Ebenezer Scrooge remaining the undisputed champion.
Yet there are many other fine, lighthearted Christmasy works, including the wonderful Dingley Dell chapters of Dickens’s own Pickwick Papers, P. G. Wodehouse’s "Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit," Damon Runyon’s "The Three Wise Guys," and Jean Shepherd’s "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash" (the basis for that nostalgia-rich and hilarious film A Christmas Story). To this day I am still moved by those two old-fashioned, sentimental classics, O. Henry’s "The Gift of the Magi" and Henry Van Dyke’s "The Story of the Other Wise Man."
The Dish 