Ordinarily, I’d be among the last people to buy a Christmas-themed novel or short story collection. As much as I love Christmas, I am also skeptical of sentimentality and nostalgia, which can feel a lot like manipulation and often wind their way into holiday-themed books and stories. But when I saw that the wonderful Jeanette Winterson was releasing a new collection of Christmas stories, I knew it would be something different --- in a good way.

Much like one of my favorite recording artists, Sufjan Stevens, who gathers friends and family to produce a holiday EP each year as a sort of musical Christmas card, Winterson has been, for a number of years, in the habit of penning an annual Christmas story. Collected here are 12 of those --- one for each of the days of Christmas --- interspersed with 12 recipes appropriate for the holiday season, from “Mrs. Winterson’s Mince Pies” to “My Twelfth Night Fishcakes.”

"I plan to pack my copy away with the stockings and ornaments until next December, when I can joyfully rediscover these stories, anecdotes and recipes all over again."

The stories and recipes are unapologetically British (including one recipe, for Sherry Trifle, that may have the most British ingredients list I’ve ever seen), but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And there is one story, “Christmas in New York,” that will particularly appeal to readers stateside; it doesn’t hurt that it’s probably the collection’s strongest love story.

Winterson tackles numerous genres, including not only romance but also gothic fairy tales and ghost stories, among the tales collected here. Some of the ghost stories are truly spooky, too, adding an extra degree of chills to the wintry atmosphere at this time of year. In “The Second-Best Bed” a houseguest who has a complicated history with her hosts suffers from troubling dreams during a holiday visit. In “Dark Christmas,” what was intended to be a Christmas getaway with friends turns into a terrifying collision with a violent past.

These stories provide a connection (as Winterson points out in her introduction) to the Victorian tradition of ghost stories (including that most famous Christmas ghost story, Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”) and also help keep this collection from being all gingerbread and candy canes --- not that it ever was in any real danger of that, given the powerful creativity and intellectual energy (not to mention the complicated backstory) of their author. We get the greatest glimpses into Winterson’s own relationship to the holiday not only in the book’s expansive introduction and conclusion but also in the mini-essays that accompany each recipe.

Here we learn, for example, about Winterson’s ritualistic approach to listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge, and about the struggles to reconcile her own reverence and appreciation for Christmas with the (naturally) less observant approach of her American Jewish wife, the feminist critic Susie Orbach. The voice in many of these first-person sections is the one readers fell in love with while reading Winterson’s memoir, WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL?, and they will be eager to reconnect with her self-deprecating humor and thoughtful appraisal of her own relationship to the winter holidays.

Speaking of ritual, one can imagine (in the right sort of family, at least) the nightly reading aloud of one of Winterson’s stories as forming the basis of a new yearly tradition for the 12 days of Christmas. As for me, I plan to pack my copy away with the stockings and ornaments until next December, when I can joyfully rediscover these stories, anecdotes and recipes all over again.