If you're more into Halloween than Christmas, Sarah Clegg's The Dead of Winter might bring you some joy. It's all about the ghosts, witches and monsters of Christmas: we're not talking Dickens here, but the Mari Lwyd, Krampus, Perchta, the Wild Hunt, and seeing premonitions of your own death.

It's a relatively short book, but seems pretty well researched, and there are sources listed after each chapter. (Unlike, say, Judith Flanders' book on Christmas traditions, it at least spells "Mari Lwyd" correctly, and doesn't pretend it's exactly the same tradition as  the Klapperbock and similar.) Clegg discusses various customs and how they're related, and also joyously participates in some of them herself. It's fascinating how creepy she found some of them (and how well she described that sensation of fun-with-an-edge-of-unease) -- definitely wouldn't catch me doing some of these things!

The book could've done with some editing, however, at least in the ebook version: there were at least two sentences that had either no beginning or no ending. The format on Kindle is also kind of annoying, because you have to tap the footnote symbol to go to the footnotes page for that chapter, where all the footnotes are denoted by symbols. I'm not very visual, and it was maddening to try to tell myself what symbol I was looking for to read the corresponding footnote, only to be stymied by the fact that they're not that visually distinct.

Still, the content was interesting!