Washington Irving's English Christmas
It's Christmas Eve and you need more seasonal fare to read. Have you considered... Washington Irving?
I'll link the Gutenberg edition of the Christmas collection below; these are all chapters of a book called The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon. You might be interested to know, if you didn't already, that "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" are in there too -- so they're probably meant to be read as what we might call genial bullshit.
Irving, and I shit you not, kind of accidentally invented Christmas in the US, from celebrating it much at all to our image of Santa Claus. That link actually gets at something interesting in the "mince pie" section that I wanted to talk about more.
See, I'm also reading Ronald Hutton's Stations of the Sun, and one of the more amazing things he observes in it is that the secularization of Christmas is because of Protestants. They banned it, you see, in England and the US, and while the end of the Interregnum saw that declaration voided, the damage had been done -- Christmas had become something people did at home, instead of at church or in public, because they would literally be arrested if they weren't showing visible signs of working and going home early to sleep on Christmas Eve and Day.
And at first, in Irving's Christmas stories, it seems like he's just sort of assuming everything English is old, but his host, a man named Bracebridge -- Geoffrey (has tried to revive the old architecture of his family mansion, down to recreating a medieval hall that's used as a parlor. There's a detail in his son's narration of his father's quirks: the family home had last renovated in "Charles the Second's time, having been repaired and altered, as my friend told me, by one of his ancestors, who returned with that monarch at the Restoration" (Irving)
The Bracebridges left England with Charles. They skipped the Interregnum. And something to know about Charles the Second is that the public was very upset with him because he married a Catholic and gave every appearance of loving her. So this sort of aligns the Bracebridges with a more tolerant Protestantism, and lo! they do all the old Catholic things, even though they're Protestant (we see them go to church on Christmas Day).
That's really it, I'm not an expert on Irving, Restoration history and literature, or folk customs. But as you read Old Christmas, a selection from Irving's larger book pointedly written by a fictional character pretending to be real, you can enjoy considering how much of Irving's sly wit is being deployed to poke fun at the conservative Protestants decrying how they didn't do Christmas properly any more.