Advent is the period beginning four Sundays before Christmas. It is a time to prepare spiritually for Christmas.
It leads to Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and then the Feast of Epiphany on 6 Jan.
This is why we celebrate 12 days of Christmas. The Feast of Epiphany celebrates the visit of The Magi to the infant Jesus Christ.
Here are 2 books to savour over the 12 days.
An English Christmas edited by John Julius Norwich is a compilation of writings on the 12 days of Christmas. We have extracts from Laurie Lee, Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, and many more others.
The Making of the Modern Christmas by Golby and Purdue is a history of how Christmas came to be celebrated today.
The Christmas rituals and decorations of today are mainly a Victorian invention of Albert, the Prince Consort. How Christmas should be celebrated today was popularised by Charles Dickens via his carol in prose A Christmas Carol.