A book designed as an advent calendar of sorts, with short chapters, a topic for each day of December until Christmas. Full of interesting facts and history, but in the end sadly trivial: it seems all the talk about trees, fake snow and reindeer is missing the point about Christmas. And another thing. He's too terse. Writes short short sentences. Lots of them. Sentence fragments galore. Eventually, annoying.

This would be a great December read-aloud for a public-school teacher (there's no religion involved); and for personal reading, if one didn't read more than one chapter per day, the writing style might not pall so fast. ( )