I was twelve when I first saw The Nutcracker performed. It was a community production presented in the high school auditorium by The Little Ballet Theater, the local ballet school in my hometown. The Sugarplum Fairy was portrayed by a girl in my class named Tricia. To be perfectly honest, she was the entire reason why the twelve-year-old son of a commercial fisherman in a Pacific Northwest fishing and logging town paid for a ticket and sat through the entire performance of the first ballet he had ever seen and about which he previously knew nothing more than that the name of it sounded very much like something he dreaded happening during dodgeball in P.E.

The fact that I now attend a performance of The Nutcracker each year should give some indication of the impression that first one made upon me. Though I might have been drawn to it out of a school-boy crush, I return each year because of the magic created on the stage each time it is performed. However despite having now seen it more times than I can readily recall, up until recently a number of questions about it remained in my mind, foremost among which was “just what is it really all about?”

I have long known that my favorite ballet was based on a tale written in 1816 by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, but for some odd reason I had never taken the time to actually read it – until, that is, I noticed that Penguin Classics had included Joachim Neugroschel’s translation of it in their 2014 series of Christmas Classics books. For some reason, this was the nudge I needed to do something I should have done decades ago – read Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker. And having now completed it, I can scarcely believe I waited so long to do so.

It’s quite remarkable, really, just how many of the stories we associate with the Christmas season have their origins in the works of writers we may not ordinarily think associated with Christmas – Dickens’ A Christmas Carol being, or course, an exception to this. When we think of Louisa May Alcott, we think of her beloved tale of Little Women. Barsetshire can scarcely be mentioned without the name of Anthony Trollope coming to mind. Nikolai Gogol is the creator of Chichikov, the infamous seeker after “dead souls.” All of these were truly brilliant writers; none come readily to mind as authors of Christmas stories.

And yet, Alcott’s holiday stories, collected as A Merry Christmas, contain all of the warmth and hope that made her Little Women so beloved to generation after generation of readers. Trollope’s works contained in Christmas at Thompson Hall were not only wildly popular in Victorian England but were the origin of a number of now much-beloved holiday traditions. And while children in much of the English-speaking world are read Clement Moore’s ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (properly, A Visit from St. Nicholas), children in The Ukraine an Russia are commonly read Gogol’s fantastic The Night Before Christmas, the tale of a the Moon-stealing Devil contending with a blacksmith named Vakula for the heart of the beautiful Oksana.

As Penguin Classics has now published all of these, as well as the aforementioned works of Dickens and Hoffmann in lovely hardcover editions in the Penguin Christmas Classics series, there has never been a better time to become much better acquainted with the literature of the Christmas season. I know I was certainly both surprised and delighted with what I discovered from reading them, and I know that reading them all will become part of my own family’s holiday traditions in the years to come.