Old stories.
New traditions.

Some stories feel like coming home. We’re gathering them here, ready for another Christmas.

Xmas Stories is a small treasury of classic seasonal literature. You’ll find ghostly adventures, tender fairy tales, a familiar Christmas Eve poem, and stories about the surprising ways we give and receive love.

Each introduction is newly written for this collection. Each header illustration is an original image created with AI assistance. The reading texts are historical public-domain editions, freely available as HTML and printable PDFs. There are no accounts, subscriptions, or paywalls.

Our sources & editions

The source collections are identified by Project Gutenberg as public domain in the United States. We use historical English texts, including Andersen’s English translations, rather than modern translations or adaptations. Public-domain status varies by country; readers outside the United States should check the rules that apply where they live.

Source files were obtained from the GITenberg mirrors of these Project Gutenberg editions. Complete source files, including their licenses and credits, are retained. Reading copies preserve the story wording, with plain-text line wrapping adjusted for reading and illustration placeholders, unrelated front matter, and other stories omitted. Each HTML reader and PDF also contains the full source license.

• A Christmas Carol — Project Gutenberg #46 (retained source & license)
• The Gift of the Magi — Project Gutenberg #2776 (retained source & license)
• A Visit from St. Nicholas — Project Gutenberg #17135 (retained source & license)
• The Fir Tree — Project Gutenberg #27200 (retained source & license)
• The Little Match Girl — Project Gutenberg #27200 (retained source & license)
• Christmas Every Day — Project Gutenberg #22519 (retained source & license)
• The Tailor of Gloucester — Project Gutenberg #14868 (retained source & license)
• The Elves and the Shoemaker — Project Gutenberg #19068 (retained source & license)
• Christmas at Red Butte — Project Gutenberg #24878 (retained source & license)

A note on names and dates

Years refer to the original story’s publication, including the Danish originals of Andersen’s tales. For Christmas Every Day, 1892 is the date of the source collection. The Gift of the Magi first appeared in 1905 and is reproduced from the 1906 collection The Four Million. A Visit from St. Nicholas appeared anonymously in 1823; its traditional attribution to Clement Clarke Moore is disputed. The Little Match Girl appears as The Little Match-Seller in our source.

More stories to share

Our family collection now includes The Tailor of Gloucester, with Beatrix Potter’s industrious Christmas mice; The Elves and the Shoemaker, a Grimm tale about gratitude and thoughtful gifts; and Christmas at Red Butte, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s hopeful prairie adventure.

The Tailor of Gloucester was privately printed in 1902 and commercially published in 1903; our text follows the latter edition. The Elves and the Shoemaker is the complete first tale in the source’s The Elves sequence, in Lucy Crane’s nineteenth-century translation. Its date refers to the original Grimm collection of 1812. The source contents date Christmas at Red Butte to 1909.

A collection with room to grow

We’re beginning with the classics. In time, we hope to welcome original stories and new voices too. For now, every complete story in this collection comes from a public-domain source edition.