By Anna Holmes

When I travel home I hide in my old bedroom, which is also a portal: It contains dozens and dozens of children’s books.
Anna Holmes
Anna Holmes - Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
The ugly truth about my holiday reading routine is that I make every attempt to avoid reading holiday books. Listen, there are lots of ways I could answer this question — yarns I could spin to put my seasonal shortcomings in the best possible light. I could say, for example, that I spend every holiday (and let’s be clear, I’m talking Christmas) catching up on my favorite birth-of-Jesus stories from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. I could say that in between tending to my famous roasted brussels sprouts and Shaker lemon pie, I like to pore over books like “Martha Stewart’s Christmas” or “Presentations: A Passion for Gift Wrapping,” which is apparently a real thing in the world. I could craft some sort of cozy collage of my family — mother, father, younger sister — sitting together in my mom’s modest suburban living room, acting out excerpts from a Nelson Doubleday Christmas collection as we sip hot chocolate and the calico cat, Miss Kitty, settles in before the fireplace.

But that would be fibbing, because the reality is, I’m not religious, I don’t know how to cook and Miss Kitty is utterly terrified of the fireplace. As for that Nelson Doubleday collection, titled “The Christmas Eve Reader,” it exists, but we haven’t opened it since 1985. (The edition we own, published in 1976, is in what used-book sellers describe as “like new” condition.) No, the reality is that when I travel across the country to the 1,200-square-foot home I lived in as a child, I gravitate not to Barbara Robinson’s “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” Lillian Smith’s “Memory of a Large Christmas” or any number of other books lovingly exhumed from my mother’s bamboo Christmas chest, but to a pair of teak bookshelves in a tiny, dark room down the hallway.