3 Festive Book Traditions to Start This Year

Everyone celebrates the holidays in their own way, but if you ask most people what matters most, tradition is likely to top the list. One of my favourite things to do over the past few years has been to start some new Christmas traditions with my friends and family, with a bookish twist of course! You might have heard of the Icelandic tradition of Jólabókaflóðið (Christmas book flood), but today I’m sharing three more festive bookish traditions I love and that you might like to try too!

Bookish Advent

A Book Advent Calendar is a wonderful way to count down to Christmas with a bookish twist and has been a favourite tradition of ours since my daughter was small. I have written a bit about Book Advent before (here and here and here). The most obvious way to do this is to have a book wrapped to open each day as you count down from 1 December to Christmas day. BUT one of the things I really love about this tradition is how you can tweak it suit your own needs.

The first time I did a Book Advent I wrapped 24 books, but my daughter really just wanted one or two books reread each night, and others available to browse through when she fancied. The following year we found opening a book every two or three nights was a good balance of having plenty of books out to look at, but also the fun of unwrapping something new regularly. Over the past three or four years as she has moved into reading junior fiction and chapter books, we’ve started having just four titles wrapped, one for each Sunday of Advent, with a mix of narrative novels, picture books, and collections of short stories and facts about Christmas.

I’ll share our four books for this year in the next few days, but a few extra things to note about a book advent are that not only do you not need 24 books, you also don’t need them to be new, or even books you own. Library books would be perfect if you need to bulk out your collection a bit. Also, you don’t need to wrap the books – my friend Lucy from Love Four Reading on Instagram writes the names of books on slips of paper and pops them in the kids’ advent calendar. In fact, you don’t even really need the books to have holiday themes – you could just pick 24 favourite books from throughout the year.

Family Read-Aloud

A brand-new bookish tradition for us last year was to set some time aside each night to read a Christmassy book together. We took turns reading aloud from L.D. Lapinski’s Step-Father Christmas, a fun middlegrade novel designed specifically as an Advent countdown with 25 chapters – one for each day up to Christmas. It was such a nice way to wind down at the end of the day during busy December days, and my daughter, who was almost 10 last Christmas, loved that she got to read to us too.

I think this tradition sits nicely with the idea of Book Advent – I actually have the sequel to Step-Father Christmas, The Biggest Christmas Secret ready for my daughter to unwrap as the first of this year’s four books on 1 December. While Lapinski’s books are perfect for this tradition, given they have 25 chapter, there are plenty of fabulous middlegrade Christmas novels that would be perfect for this tradition. Some of our favourites include:

• A Boy Called Christmas (or others in this series) by Matt Haig
• The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher
• Tinsel: the Girl who Invented Christmas by Sibéal Pounder

Like with the Book Advent, I think there are plenty of ways that you can make a Christmas Read-Aloud tradition your own. Perhaps you could listen to a festive audiobook together (we listened to Patrick Stewart read A Christmas Carol a few years ago and all loved it) or find some Christmassy poems and passages to read each night rather than a whole book.

Bookmas Swap: A Novel Twist on Dirty Santa

Ok, having a Christmas celebration with your book club sounds a bit obvious, but it truly has become one of my favourite traditions each year! Years ago some work friends and I started a kind of book club. We didn’t read the same books, but we were all doing the same reading challenge and would get together regularly to discuss how we were going and what we were reading for the prompts and recommending books to each other. These days it’s rare for us all to be in the office on the same day and we don’t get to catch up often but we do make a point of catching up for a ‘Bookmas’ (Bookish Christmas) lunch.

At lunch we chat a little bit about our recent reads, as well as what we want to read in the New Year and our lives in general, but the main bookish event that really makes the get-together feel like Bookmas is a book swap in the style of the gift stealing game ‘Dirty Santa‘ or ‘White Elephant’.

To play, everyone brings a wrapped book with a few clues attached, like a blind-date with a book you see in bookstores. We draw numbers to get the order we’ll pick in, pass the wrapped books around the table so everyone gets a good look at the clues on each, and then take turns either choosing a book from the table, or ‘stealing’ one someone else has already chosen. It is really a lot of fun, and a great way for everyone to share and chat about their favourite reads of the year, as generally the books everyone brings are ones they’ve loved over the past 12 months. The stack of books up there is from last year’s swap, and you can see we get a great variety of titles.

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From the cosy read-alouds with family to bookish gift exchanges with friends, these traditions are a wonderful way to bring literature into your holiday celebrations and are some of my favourite parts of the festive season each year. Do you have a favourite bookish tradition or a festive reading recommendation? Share it in the comments—I’d love to hear how you celebrate the holidays with books! Do also please let me know if you’re planning to give any of these ideas a try!

xo Bron

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