Holiday books 2023: 50 books that make great gifts from hip hop histories to Christmas ghost stories

Christopher Borrelli | Chicago Tribune (TNS)

Stephen Nissenbaum, in his terrific 1997 history of the holiday season, “The Battle for Christmas,” goes briefly in search of the very first advertisement for Christmas presents — the Yuletide Patient Zero, if you will — and finds an ad urging Americans to buy a good book at the holidays. The year that advertisement ran: 1806, in New England. Within 50 years, this newspaper was running holiday ads for scarves and silk dresses, but a chunk of its Christmas ads were still for books ...