This is going to be brief, because I have little time.

Every year my wife and I put up the same tree. It has the same ornaments (with an extra one or two to commemorate any travels we may have been on), the same lights, the same insane amount of tinsel garlands that I insist on. The same trunk, the same branches, sometimes better spread out and fluffed than other times, but you get where I’m going with this.

Every year it is different. Every year the story it tells is different, even if most of the characters are the same, and many have patterns they fall into. (I have a polar bear on skis, a mono skier, Rupert the bear on a sledge and a sledging penguin who always race down the tree, the order varies. Typing this, I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this before on this blog.)

Every story has already been told they say. Every story structure explained, every combination exhausted. And yet still we read, for the familiar as much as for the thrill of the unexpected, or even the new.

So books are like Christmas trees, built around repeatable, eternal elements, but each one sparkling in its own lights, ornamented in its own pattern, catching the eye and potentially delighting the mind in its own unique way.

So this festive season, celebrate with a book.