“Here we are again! Bless me, I believe I said that before – but after all you don’t want Christmas to be different each year, do you?”
As we come to the end of 2025, we offer a boxing day treat – a quiz celebrating Christmas (and Christmas-adjacent) literature from Austen and Dickens to contemporary fiction, poems, and song.
1.
“One can never have enough socks. Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”
Which literary character offers this frustrated reflection?
2.
“It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armour. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.”
The protagonist of which 1851 novel sets out one Christmas on a long sea voyage?
3.
“Christmas always rustled. It rustled every time, mysteriously, with silver and gold paper, tissue paper and a rich abundance of shiny paper, decorating and hiding everything and giving a feeling of reckless extravagance.”
The extract above is taken from The Sculptor’s Daughter, published in 1968. The book is a memoire by which Swedish-speaking Finnish writer? It was the author’s first book for adults.
4.
“It’s coming on Christmas / They’re cutting down trees…”
Which musician sang these lyrics in her 1971 song?
5.
“A little before twilight one Christmas eve, Gabriel shouldered his spade, lighted his lantern, and betook himself towards the old churchyard…”
“The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton” appears in which Dickens novel, published between 1836 and 1837?
6.
Which author describes the journey of the three kings thus:
“Such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.”
7.
Interspersed with “tiddley-poms,” what is the opening line of the song sung by Pooh and Piglet as they build Eeyore the titular House at Pooh Corner?
8.
“The night, as if on purpose, shone so brilliantly; the gleam of the snow made the beams of the moon still whiter.”
Published in 1832 as “Nich pered Rizdvom” (The Night Before Christmas), the above is an extract from a short story by which Ukrainian novelist and playwright? Other works include The Nose and Diary of a Madman.
9.
Which short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, centred on the theft of a near-priceless gemstone and the loss of a goose, is the only Sherlock Holmes tale set at Christmas?
10.
“Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.”
From which novel, first published in 1950, is this passage taken?
11.
In which 1815 novel does Mr Elton remark that Christmas is “quite the season indeed for friendly meetings?”
12.
“Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar…”
From which largely autobiographical Truman Capote short story, published in 1956, does this extract originate?
13.
Which fictional character famously declares: “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents”? The opening line of the 1868 novel.
14.
“The sky was a wide blue eye above her. When it paled, near midnight, the sun would skim below the edge of the horizon, then resurface in a blink, shedding a milky half-light. In the distance squatted the upturned tabletop of Hekla. It spat smoke and ash into the sky, sometimes spewing out black rocks and lava to entomb the land and people for miles around. Hekla was known to be the open door into Hell.”
This passage is from which 2019 gothic novel, set in Iceland in 1686? The work was the debut novel of Jersey-born writer, Caroline Lea.
15.
“At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them … Though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe.”
From which 1985 book does this passage stem? The book was written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg.
16.
“You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feasts we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier – all that buttered bread, the potato dumplings, the sausages – eaten with disregard, swallowing without tasting, leaving great crumbs on our plates, scraps of fat. In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor. But June seemed like paradise by winter.”
This passage is taken from City of Thieves by David Benioff. During which event in the Second World War does the book take place?
17.
“The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.”
This is the first description of which character, the central figure of an 1843 novella?
Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash.
18.
“Marie supposedly is still queen of a land where you can see sparkling Christmas Forests everywhere as well as translucent Marzipan Castles – in short, the most splendid and most wondrous things, if you only have the right eyes to see them with.”
This passage is taken from which literary fairytale, written in 1816 by E. T. A. Hoffmann and set on Christmas Eve?
19.
“The wind swept the snow aside, ever faster and thicker, as if it were trying to catch up with something, and Yurii Andreievich stared ahead of him out of the window, as if he were not looking at the snow but were still reading Tonia’s letter and as if what flickered past him were not small dry snow crystals but the spaces between the small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.”
From which 1957 novel is this extract taken?
20.
“The week before Christmas, when snow seemed to lie thickest, was the moment for carol-singing; and when I think back to those nights it is to the crunch of snow and to the lights of the lanterns on it.”
From which book, written in 1959, is the above extract taken? The first of a trilogy, the novel is an account of the author’s childhood in Gloucestershire during and after the First World War.
21.
“Nothing could exceed the brilliancy and gaiety of the scene by day. But it was at night that the carnival was at its merriest. For the frost continued unbroken; the nights were of perfect stillness; the moon and stars blazed with the hard fixity of diamonds, and to the fine music of flute and trumpet the courtiers danced.”
Which novel contains this description of a winter carnival on the frozen Thames?
22.
“In the gloom of whiteness,
In the great silence of snow,
A child was sighing
And bitterly saying: ‘Oh,
They have killed a white bird up there on her nest,
The down is fluttering from her breast.’
And still it fell through that dusky brightness
On the child crying for the bird of the snow.”
Which British poet, killed in action in 1917, wrote this poem during the First World War? The poem would later be set to music by Ivor Gurney, a close friend.
23.
“As the glow of the cabin windows turned to flickers through the trees and then to black, her eyes adjusted and the starlight alone on the pure white snow was enough to light her way. The cold scorched her cheeks and her lungs, but she was warm in her fox hat and wool. An owl swooped through the spruce boughs, a slow-flying shadow, but she was not frightened. She felt old and strong, like the mountains and the river. She would find her way home.”
The above is an early passage from which book, inspired by a Russian folk tale and set in 1920s Alaska? A 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist, the book was the debut novel by Eowyn Ivey.
24.
“He at length allowed his head to be duly adjusted, and standing behind the table, which let him appear above it only as far as his broad frill, so that he looked like a cherubic head untroubled with a body, he began with a clear chirp, and in a melody that had the rhythm of an industrious hammer, –
God rest you merry, gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay … ”
In which George Eliot novel does a neighbour attempt to lure a misanthrope to church with carols and lard cakes?
25.
“They drove from shop to shop. The air was white, and when they alighted it tasted like cold pennies… Vulgarity reigned. Public-houses, besides their usual exhortation against temperance reform, invited men to ‘Join our Christmas goose club’ – one bottle of gin, etc., or two, according to subscription. A poster of a woman in tights heralded the Christmas pantomime, and little red devils, who had come in again that year, were prevalent upon the Christmas-cards.”
In which 1910 novel does Margaret Schlegel observe the vulgarity of Christmas shopping? The novel was adapted into a film in 1992, produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory.
26.
“Here we are again! Bless me, I believe I said that before – but after all you don’t want Christmas to be different each year, do you?”
What title was given to the collection of missives written and illustrated by J. R. R. Tolkien between 1920 and 1943 for his children?
BONUS
“You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah… in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.”
What is the common title of this 1897 editorial by Francis Pharcellus Church? Published in the New York newspaper The Sun, it has since become the most reprinted editorial in the English language.
Photo by Matthias Kinsella on Unsplash.
Answers
- Albus Dumbledore
- Moby Dick
- Tove Jansson (her father was sculptor Viktor Bernhard “Faffan” Jansson)
- Joni Mitchell (River)
- The Pickwick Papers
- T. S. Eliot (Journey of the Magi)
- The more it snows
- Nikolai Gogol
- The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
- The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
- Emma
- A Christmas Memory
- Jo March (Little Women)
- The Glass Woman
- The Polar Express
- The Siege of Leningrad
- Ebenezer Scrooge
- The Nutcracker (and the Mouse King)
- Doctor Zhivago
- Cider With Rosie
- Orlando
- Edward Thomas
- The Snow Child
- Silas Marner
- Howards End (E. M. Forster)
- Letters From Father Christmas
BONUS: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” (also known as: “Is There a Santa Claus?”)
– Max Parfitt