Summary:
A mixed bag of a Christmas SF anthology, but it has two very good stories from Arthur C. Clarke (the Hugo winning The Star) and James White (his widely anthologised Christmas Treason), and good supporting work from John Christopher, Gordon R. Dickson, and Brian W. Aldiss.
The presence of the Robinson and Wolfe stories is a mystery, and I can only assume the Asimov and Pohl are there for their name value.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

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Fiction:
Christmas on Ganymede • short story by Isaac Asimov ∗∗
Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus • novelette by Frederik Pohl ∗∗
The Santa Claus Planet • novelette by Frank M. Robinson ∗
Christmas Tree • short story by John Christopher ∗∗∗
The Star • short story by Arthur C. Clarke ∗∗∗∗
The Christmas Present • short story by Gordon R. Dickson ∗∗∗
Christmas Treason • novelette by James White ∗∗∗∗
The New Father Christmas • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗
La Befana • short story by Gene Wolfe ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Robert Chronister
Introduction • by Terry Carr

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I’ve already reviewed all the stories in this Christmas SF anthology either here or on sfshortstories.com, so—if you have read those—skip down to the three dots for the summary comments.

Christmas on Ganymede by Isaac Asimov (Startling Stories, January 1942)¹ opens with Olaf Johnson hanging decorations in the colony’s dome when he and all the other men are summoned to a meeting with their boss: they learn that, thanks to Johnson, the native Ossies (who are the colony’s labour force) have learned about Christmas and will go on strike unless Santa Claus visits. Johnson is nominated to be Santa.
The rest of the story sees the conversion of an anti-grav sled into a sleigh, the capture and sedation of Ganymedean spineybacks for use as reindeer, and the costuming of Johnson:

“I’m not going anywhere in this costume!” he roared, gouging at the nearest eye. “You hear me?”
There certainly was cause for objection. Even at his best, Olaf had never been a heartthrob. But in his present condition, he resembled a hybrid between a spinie’s nightmare and a Picassian conception of a patriarch.
He wore the conventional costume of Santa. His clothes were as red as red tissue paper sewed onto his space coat could make it. The “ermine” was as white as cotton wool, which it was. His beard, more cotton wool glued into a linen foundation, hung loosely from his ears. With that below and his oxygen nosepiece above, even the strongest were forced to avert their eyes. p. 88

Johnson’s perilous flight to the Ossies’ camp is made even more dangerous when the spineys wake up en route, but he eventually gets there safely. The Ossies get Christmas tree ornaments for presents (they think the globes are “Sannyclaws eggs”), and then demand a visit every year—which to them is a seven-day revolution around Jupiter.
This is an early work by Asimov that’s longer than it needs to be and whose characters are rather cartoonish (one of the prospectors—sorry, colonists—chews tobacco). But it’s a pleasant enough piece that produced a couple of smiles.
∗∗ (Average). 5,450 words. Story link.

•

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl (Alternating Currents, 1956) is, partially, an “if this goes one” satire about the commercialisation of Christmas, and begins with the story’s narrator, Mr Martin, recruiting a young woman called Lilymary Hargreave for his department at Heinemann’s store. Her job is to gift-wrap and label shoppers’ Christmas purchases, and it’s here where we get the first dose of satire (apart an earlier mention that this Christmas rush is happening in early September):

[Lilymary] called me over near closing time. She looked distressed and with some reason. There was a dolly filled with gift-wrapped packages, and a man from Shipping looking annoyed. She said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Martin, but I seem to have done something wrong.”
The Shipping man snorted. “Look for yourself, Mr. Martin,” he said, handing me one of the packages.
I looked. It was wrong, all right. Heinemann’s new wrinkle that year was a special attached gift card—a simple Yule scene and the printed message:

The very Merriest of Season’s Greetings
From …………………………………
To ……………………………………
$8.50

The price varied with the item, of course. Heinemann’s idea was for the customer to fill it out and mail it, ahead of time, to the person it was intended for. That way, the person who got it would know just about how much he ought to spend on a present for the first person. It was smart, I admit, and maybe the smartest thing about it was rounding the price off to the nearest fifty cents instead of giving it exactly. Heinemann said it was bad-mannered to be too precise—and the way the customers were going for the idea, it had to be right.

When Lilymary says she can’t complete the job as she needs to go home to her father, Martin does it himself. Then, when she doesn’t come in the day after, Martin goes to her house. There he finds that the father, Lilymary, and the other three daughters are Sabbath observant.
The rest of the story sees Martin romantically pursue Lilymary, which provides a clash-of-cultures situation between him and the family, who have just returned to the United States after a long time in Borneo as religious missionaries. Consequently, they don’t have a TV or dishwasher or any mod-cons, or any interest in them. They also provide their own entertainment and, during an after dinner session, when Martin sings a particularly commercialised version of ’Tis the Season of Christmas (“Come Westinghouse, Philco! Come Hotpoint, G.E.! Come Sunbeam! Come Mixmaster! Come to the Tree!”), the atmosphere sours. Then, when he later arranges for the visit of a Santa Claus and the Elves sales team to the house, the relationship breaks down completely. Eventually (spoiler), at the suggestion of his boss, Martin proposes to Lilymary (“Why not marry her for a while?”), she rejects him, and then he finds out the family is leaving once again for Borneo, so he tries again. He eventually succeeds when he tracks them down to a church service, prays with Lilymary, and then gets religion.
This is okay I guess, but it would have been a more interesting piece if it had concentrated on the Christmas satire and not the boy-wants-girl story.
∗∗ (Average). 8, 250 words.

•

The Santa Claus Planet by Frank M. Robinson (The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1951) opens with a spaceship landing on a planet to celebrate Christmas; two of the crew are later sent to a nearby village to greet the humans that settled there previously and invite them to the ship.
En-route the pair are met by the natives, who proffer gifts, and a voice from the sleigh tells them to destroy the gifts and hand over their pistols. After some reluctance the two crew members do so, whereupon the natives break the pistols into pieces. Then they discover that the man who spoke is a recent arrival called Reynolds, who they subsequently take back with them.
The rest of the story consists (apart from another bookend to finish the story) of Reynolds telling of how he came to be on the planet, which starts with him arriving after he damaged his spaceship tubes. While he was trying to repair his ship the natives arrived, and he was drawn into their strange gift giving custom (which is later explained by a friendly female tribe member called Ruth):

She thought for a minute, trying to find a way to phrase it. “We use our coppers and furs in duels,” she said slowly. “Perhaps one chief will give a feast for another and present him with many coppers and blankets. Unless the other chief destroys the gifts and gives a feast in return, at which he presents the first chief with even greater gifts, he loses honor.”
He was beginning to see, Reynolds thought. The custom of conspicuous waste, to show how wealthy the possessor was. Enemies dueled with property, instead of with pistols, and the duel would obviously go back and forth until one or the other of its participants was bankrupt—or unwilling to risk more goods. A rather appropriate custom for a planet as lush as this.
“What if one of the chiefs goes broke,” he said, explaining the term.
“If the winning chief demands it, the other can be put to death. He is forced to drink the Last Cup, a poison which turns his bones to jelly. The days go by and he gets weaker and softer until finally he is nothing but a—ball.” She described this with a good deal of hand waving and facial animation, which Reynolds found singularly attractive in spite of the gruesomeness of the topic.

This unlikely gimmick works through a few gift-exchange plot loops until (spoiler) Reynolds runs out of potential gifts, and also realises that Ruth is also going to be poisoned for helping him. He avoids this unpleasant end by giving the impression that he is going to destroy the planet with fire (I think) after they destroy his rocket. The chief concedes before the oil fire Reynolds previously set burns out.
There is another twist revealed at the end (when Reynolds is once again on the visiting ship): Reynolds married Ruth and became the wealthiest man on the planet because they had 15 children, each of which attracted ever-increasing dowries.
This story revolves around an unconvincing and contrived gimmick, the ending is a fudge, and the last twist just adds even more nonsense to what has come before (and seems to be the only reason the sections that book-end the piece are there). Why Bleiler and Dikty (the editors of the ‘Best of the Year’ anthology where this first appeared) thought it a good idea to use this original story beats me (and I can only assume Terry Carr reprinted it for Towering Inferno² name recognition).
∗ (Mediocre). 8,500 words.

•

The quality of the stories in this anthology picks up markedly at this point with Christmas Tree by John Christopher (Astounding, February 1949), which opens with an astronaut called Davies arriving on Earth. After his medical (we learn that space crew get one after every flight), he goes to buy a Christmas tree to take back to the Moon. We subsequently learn that a man called Hans has been exiled there for forty years because of a final health warning, which meant it would be suicide to undertake another trip back to Earth (the story’s gimmick is that no-one can predict how long it will be between an astronaut’s first and final warning—there can be several years between them—and many astronauts take the chance of continuing for a period after the first).
At the nursery, the owner shows Davies around:

“Major Davies, I’m delighted to see you. We don’t see many spacemen. Come and see my roses.”
He seemed eager and I let him take me. I wasn’t breaking my neck to get back into town.
He had a glasshouse full of roses. I hesitated in the doorway. Mr. Cliff said: “Well?”
“I’d forgotten they smelled like that,” I told him.
He said proudly, “It’s quite a showing. A week before Christmas and a showing like that. Look at this Frau Karl Druschki.”
It was a white rose, very nicely shaped and scented like spring. The roses had me. I crawled around after Mr. Cliff, seeing roses, feeling roses, breathing roses. I looked at my watch when it began to get dark.

After Davies explains Hans’ situation to the owner (during which he reveals he has had his own first health warning) he gets the tree for free.
When Davies eventually gets back to the Moon (spoiler), he and Louie (the part-time quartermaster who helped him smuggle the tree onboard) go to find Hans, but they find that he has passed away. The pair, along with another man, take Hans out onto the surface to bury him:

Portugese halted the caterpillar on the crest of a rise about midway between Luna City and Kelly’s Crater. It was the usual burial ground; the planet’s surface here was crosshatched in deep grooves by some age-old catastrophe. We clamped down the visors on our suits and got out. Portugese and I carried old Hans easily between us, his frail body fantastically light against lunar gravity. We put him down carefully in a wide, deep cleft, and I turned around toward the truck. Louie walked toward us, carrying the Christmas tree.
There had been moisture on it, which had frozen instantly into sparkling frost. It looked like a centerpiece out of a store window. It had seemed a good idea back in Luna City, but now it didn’t seem appropriate.
We wedged it in with rocks, Portugese read a prayer, and we walked back to the caterpillar, glad to be able to let our visors down again and light up cigarettes. We stayed there while we smoked, looking through the front screen. The tree stood up green and white against the sullen, hunching blackness of Kelly’s Crater. Right overhead was the Earth, glowing with daylight. I could make out Italy, clear and unsmudged, but farther north Hans’s beloved Austria was hidden under blotching December cloud.

The story finishes with Davies going to his delayed medical, where he gets his final warning—he is stuck on the Moon. Later, Davies goes to the observatory, where he looks at Earth and thinks he can smell roses.
The science in this story is a bit dated or just plain wrong in some parts (information about the Moon’s rotation, atmosphere, and body-eating insect life, etc.) but, if you can filter that out, it’s a pretty good piece, and an accomplished debut.
∗∗∗ (Good). 3,200 words. Story link.

•

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke (Infinity, November 1955)³ has the chief astronomer of an expedition to an ancient supernova give an account of their completed mission. Their key discovery is that the solar system around the star was home to an advanced civilisation and, before the latter was destroyed, they managed to build a vault on the outermost planet of their system—a memorial to their species. This provides a wealth of information to the expedition.
The discovery also sees the chief astronomer—who is also a Jesuit—struggle with his religious faith from the very start of the story: why would God destroy a whole people in this way? Is this a question a religious person should even ask, etc.?
The story’s final twist (spoiler) comes when the expedition’s calculations reveal that the supernova was the star that shone over Bethlehem over two thousand years ago.
The brooding thoughts of the priest, which are set against the cosmic background of the supernova remnants, make this much more than what would otherwise be a clever gimmick story. That said, and however well done the character study, it is the surprise ending that provides most of the impact—and that’s obviously less effective on re-reading. Still, I wouldn’t quibble with this being described as one of the genre’s classics.
∗∗∗∗ (Very good). 2,450 words.

•

The Christmas Present by Gordon R. Dickson (F&SF, January 1958) opens with a young boy called Allan talking to an alien called Harvey about how his mother is decorating a thorn tree for the family’s first Xmas on the planet:

There was beauty on Cidor, but it was a different beauty. It was a black-and-silver world where the thorn trees stood up like fine ink sketches against the cloud-torn sky; and this was beautiful. The great and solemn fishes that moved about the uncharted pathways of its seas were beautiful with the beauty of large, far-traveled ships. And even Harvey, though he did not know it himself, was most beautiful of all with his swelling iridescent jellyfish body and the yard-long mantle of silver filaments spreading out through it and down through the water. Only his voice was croaky and unbeautiful, for a constricted air-sac is not built for the manufacture of human word.  pp. 34-35

Allan adds that the decorations will make the tree beautiful, and that Harvey will understand what “beautiful” means when he sees the finished product. However, when Allan goes back to the house on his own, what he sees upsets him, as the tree isn’t the same as the one on the ship out. After his mother consoles him Allan goes out and briefly brings Harvey in to see the tree before taking him back to the water.
Allan and his mother wrap their presents later that evening, and he tells her that he wants to give Harvey one of his figurines, a painted clay astrogator, as a Christmas present. His mother tells him it is too late to go out again, so she goes to give the gift to Harvey instead, and also explains to the alien the concept of exchanging presents at Christmas time. Then she asks Harvey about water-bulls—dangerous sea creatures known to attack boats—as her husband will be coming back by river the next day. Harvey tells her their behaviour isn’t consistent (“One will. One will not”), before adding that his species is “electric”, so the water-bulls don’t bother them.
After Allan’s mother leaves (spoiler), Harvey swims out of the outlet and swims to a place between two islands where he finds a water-bull; he tells it he has come to make it into a present.
The story closes with Allan’s father returning home the next day by boat. En route he and the other settlers find a dead water-bull floating on the surface and, on closer examination, they find the crushed body of a Cidorian nearby. Allan’s father realises that the dead Cidorian is Harvey, his son’s friend, and asks the other settlers not to tell him about what they have seen. After they leave, there is an elegiac closing passage:

Behind them, the water-bull carcass, disturbed, slid free of the waterlogged tree and began to drift downriver. The current swung it and rolled, slowly, over and over until the crushed central body of the dead Cidorian rose into the clean air. And the yellow rays of the clear sunlight gleamed from the glazed pottery countenance of a small toy astrogator, all wrapped about with silver threads, and gilded it.  p. 42

I didn’t really buy the ending of this one, which seems to involve an overly disproportionate act in return for a simple gift. But I liked the alien setting, Harvey, and the last passage was still rattling around inside my head days later.
∗∗∗ (Good). 3,300 words. Story link.

•

Christmas Treason by James White (F&SF, January 1962) is about a secret group of young children with telepathic and telekinetic powers who attempt to solve the puzzle of how Santa manages to deliver so many presents at the same time:

Richard shook his head. “None of the grown-ups can say how exactly it happens, they just tell us that Santa will come all right, that we’ll get our toys in time and not to worry about it. But we can’t help worrying about it. That’s why we’re having an Investigation to find out what really happens.
“We can’t see how one man, even when he has a sleigh and magic reindeer that fly through the air, can bring everybody their toys all in one night . . .” Richard took a deep breath and got ready to use his new, grown-up words. “Delivering all that stuff during the course of a single night is a logistical impossibility.”
Buster, Mub and Greg looked impressed. Loo thought primly, “Richard is showing off,” and Liam said, “I think he’s got a jet.”  p.7

After some more discussion, their leader Richard sends the three boys off looking for large caverns as he thinks there is a chance that this is where they may find Santa’s secret toy factories. The boys have the ability to travel to places that closely match what they can visualise in their minds, and it isn’t long before one of them finds something:

In Liam’s mind was the memory of a vast, echoing corridor so big it looked like a street. It was clean and brightly lit and empty. There was a sort of crane running along the roof with grabs hanging down, a bit like the ones he had seen lifting coal at the docks only these were painted red and yellow, and on both sides of the corridor stood a line of tall, splendid, unmistakable shapes. Rockets.
Rockets, thought Richard excitedly: that was the answer, all right! Rockets were faster than anything, although he didn’t quite see how the toys would be delivered. Still, they would find that out easily now that they knew where the secret cavern was.
“Did you look inside them for toys?” Greg broke in, just ahead of the others asking the same question.
Liam had. Most of the rockets were filled with machinery and the nose had sort of sparkly stuff in it.
All the ones he had looked at were the same and he had grown tired of floating about among the noses of the rockets and gone exploring instead. At the other end of the corridor there was a big notice with funny writing on it. He was standing in front of it when two grown-ups with guns started running at him and yelling nonsense words. He got scared, and left.  p.10-11

Matters are complicated by the children having to return to their houses in different parts of the world to be present for mealtimes and naps, etc. Meanwhile, Richard thinks about a recent visit to a store that had lots of toys in it, and recalls his parents’ conversation as his dad offered to buy his mother a piece of jewellery:

Then Mummy had said, But John, are you sure you can afford it? It’s robbery, sheer robbery! These storekeepers are robbers at Christmas time!
Guards all over the place, Greg’s theory, and storekeepers who were robbers at Christmas time. It was beginning to make sense, but Richard was very worried by the picture that was forming.  p.13

Alarmed by the conclusions Richard has reached, the group formulate a plan that will ensure children throughout the world get their Xmas presents!
This is both seasonal and charming, and has all the elements you would want in such a story: it is cleverly plotted, amusing, features cute, precocious children, has an appropriate amount of sentimentality, and (spoiler) an ending that involves world peace. A very good novelette.⁴
∗∗∗∗ (Very  Good).

•

The New Father Christmas by Brian W. Aldiss (F&SF, January 1958) concerns Roberta and Robin, an old couple who live in an automated factory in the year 2388 (Roberta is forgetful, and Robin is the mostly bed-ridden caretaker). When Roberta realises it is Xmas day she goes downstairs to invite three tramps up to the flat (the tramps have an illegal home on the factory floor, but have to block the door every day to avoid being evicted by the “Terrible Sweeper”).
When the four of them arrive back to the flat, Robin is up and about—and not at all happy to find that Roberta has invited the tramps to spend the day with them. Then a Xmas card arrives for Robin but addressed to “Factory X10”. This causes Robin to become quite agitated because he is the caretaker of SC541, so he orders his wife and the three tramps to go and check the factory’s name on the output gate. On the way there, and back, the four of them discuss the factory’s change of output from television sets to strange metal eggs.
The group eventually return and confirm to Robin that the factory is now called X10. Jerry also reveals that he has bought one of the eggs back with him:

“I brought it because I thought the factory ought to give us a Christmas present,” Jerry told them dreamily, squatting down to look at the egg. “You see, a long time ago, before the machines declared all writers like me redundant, I met an old robot writer. And this old robot writer had been put out to scrap, but he told me a thing or two. And he told me that as machines took over man’s duties, so they took over his myths too. Of course, they adapt the myths to their own beliefs, but I think they’d like the idea of handing out Christmas presents.”  p. 73

Jerry’s thoughts are met with further belligerence from Robin, and Jerry responds by saying that New Father Christmas will come for him (New Father Christmas apparently takes old people and machines away).
When the egg later hatches Roberta becomes alarmed, as it looks as if the egg is going to build another factory in the flat—so she stamps on it. Then the group realise that the egg is wirelessing for help, so they flee, only to be caught on the stairs by . . . .
This is a little on the slight side, but the robot factory setting (with its interstitial humans, and the new myths that have arisen) is captivatingly and amusingly done.
∗∗∗ (Good). 2,100 words. Story link.

•

La Befana by Gene Wolfe (Galaxy, January-February 1973) opens with an alien called Zozz arriving at a human settler’s household on Christmas Eve. There Zozz waits for the man of the family, John “Bananas” Bannano, to come home.
Once Bannano arrives there are several conversations that run in parallel about (a) the family’s emigration to Zozz’s planet (b) the mother-in-law, who goes into the room next door to avoid Zozz, and (c) a story about a witch eternally dammed to look for the baby Jesus/Messiah.
The last line draws this together somewhat with (spoiler) the mother-in-law saying she’ll only have to search until tomorrow night.
This is either a simple idea complicated by the various lines of conversation (in one or two places it’s hard to work out who is talking to who), or I missed the point. Either way, I suspect it is a slight piece.
∗ (Mediocre). 1,450 words.

•••

The Cover is a rather bland, monochromatic affair. I presume most hardbacks were destined for libraries, so they probably didn’t have to sell themselves in bookstores.
There is a short Introduction by Terry Carr where he briefly describes the tension between science and religion that is sometimes found in SF Christmas stories.

•••

In conclusion, a very mixed bag of an anthology: about half of it is worth your attention; as for the rest, well, it’s hard to see why the Wolfe and Robinson are here, and the Asimov and Pohl are at best, average (were they included for their name value?) I also have a problem with the odd running order. Why would you open the book with three of the longer stories? Why wouldn’t you finish the book with the spiritual and philosophical The Star? Why have two of the lighter stories (the White and the Aldiss), and two of the stories that involve death (the Clarke and the Dickson) next to each other? I didn’t have a particularly good opinion of Carr as an editor before this volume, and this won’t shift the dial.  ●

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1. This was published around the same time as Nightfall and the first ‘Foundation’ stories (late 1941 to mid-1942), but was written a year or so earlier, as Asimov notes in The Early Asimov:

The success of “Reason” didn’t mean that I was to have no further rejections from Campbell.
On December 6, 1940, influenced by the season and never stopping to think that a Christmas story must sell no later than July in order to make the Christmas issue, I began “Christmas on Ganymede.” I submitted it to him on the twenty-third, but the holiday season did not affect his critical judgment. He rejected it.
I tried Pohl next, and, as was happening so often that year, he took it. In this case, for reasons I will describe later, the acceptance fell through. I eventually sold it the next summer (June 27, 1941, the proper time of year) to Startling Stories, the younger, sister magazine of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

2. The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson (1974) was made into a big-budget disaster film called The Towering Inferno (1974), more here.

3. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star won the 1956 Hugo for Best Short Story (against what looks like a fairly weak list of finalists).

4. Christmas Treason was quite widely reprinted for a Xmas story, making it into two ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies and three Xmas ones, as well as others. Its publication history on ISFDB.  ●