Let me be the first to welcome you to the Christmas season! If you have waited until the day after thanksgiving to set up your decorations, than wait not another minute for Christmas to begin! If you already have some of your decorations set up, and you’ve been listening to Christmas music for a month or more, than let me say, you and me both! The opinion of when to start being Christmassy seems to be quite the debate (I found this out when I was with friends last weekend and the discussion got pretty heated), but I think it’s safe to say by now “Welcome to the Christmas season!!!!”

Unless of course, you’re one of those people who doesn’t want anything to do with Christmas until the first day of December. If you are one of these people, would you mind letting me know in the comments or emailing me at jessapillowcaseproject@gmail.com so we can have a conversation. I need to understand your way of thinking, because it doesn’t quit make sense to me.

Anyways, I figured the day after Thanksgiving would be the most wonderful time of the year to start talk of Christmas books.

Every November I go around and gather up all the Christmas books I want to read that holiday season. I dig some of a few out of a box where all our Christmas picture books spend their time off. I snag a few from my Mom’s bookshelf. I select some from my own shelf, and I make sure I have one or two downloaded on my Audible bookshelf. And I inevitably do some searching for a few new ones.

When I have stacked up all my TBR Christmas books I stand there looking at them for a minute just admiring them. But then I start overthinking the order.

I tend to overthink a lot of things in life. It’s a problem that I’m trying to get under control because I don’t want all my posterity after I’m dead and gone to say, “Ah, yes. Grandma Jessa. We do miss the way she always had to overthink everything. She was great at overthinking. Remember that time when she couldn’t decide if she wanted to go fishing with Uncle So&So or to the quilt shop with Aunt What’s-Her-Name.” (I’ve learned that quilting isn’t really my thing, so in this hypothetical situation I would probably choose fishing. But then again, I love fabric even if I don’t love quilting. But I love fishing. But I also love the kinds of people who go to quilt shops and spending time with them sounds like a fun social moment.)

My tendency to overthink things is a problem. I’m trying to deal with that personal dilemma. And hopefully by next year I won’t overthink everything under the sun, including Christmas reading material. Ideally, this should be the only blogpost of its kind.

Back to the stack of Christmas books that I started overthinking.

I thought to myself, I should start out the season with Skipping Christmas. But then I thought, or do I want a spiritual book to start with? I had figured Skipping Christmas would be a nice start since it’s lighthearted and cozy. But then I remembered reading that one last year with the light of the Christmas tree, and my Christmas tree wasn’t yet set up when I was trying to choose my first book of Christmas. For a split-second I thought about starting with A Christmas Carol or Shepherds Abiding, but I immediately decided that those would have to wait until closer to Christmas Day.

After all this I settled on a small little book called Born This Happy Morning, which I had stolen/taken with permission from my grandma, and it seemed to fit both the spiritual and light hearted genre that I was considering. It was a great book to kick off my Christmas reading.

The second book was pretty easy to choose. I’m reading The Last Man in the Inn right now, and I will hopefully finish this afternoon.

But now I need to figure out what I’m going to read next. I always worry that I’m not going to get through all my Christmas books in one season, so I have to prioritize and that gets complicated. Usually, and this year included, I end up staring at a calendar, trying to figure out when I will be finished with book B if I it takes me an entire three days to read book A. But what if I read book C before book A? Would that make book A go faster because I would be reading it mostly on a weekend? And I do this all the way through books J and K. I really don’t like math, but this whole prosses started to feel a lot like algebra when I was going through it a couple weeks ago.

And that is why I came up with a non-overthink-itory way of choosing which Christmas book I will read next. Rather than stacking them all up together and taking the next one off the pile, I divided them up and placed them around my room with the other Christmas decorations. Now, rather than having a to-do list of books to read, I have pretty literary decorations. I decided that these three looked nice together because of their sizes and color combinations.

And who knows if I’ll keep these right here, but it seemed like a fun idea in the moment.

My Christmas tree is white, blue, and gold so I was excited to have some books that match.

Now, when I finish my current read this afternoon I will try to make the decision simple and just choose the first one that looks most appealing. This is all part of my effort to live a life of less overthinking. I figure that without all my overthinking, I could probably do a lot more reading.

Plus, I have realized in the last year that reading isn’t any fun for me when I make it into a task. When I have my TBR books lined up on a shelf in the order I plan to read them it takes away the fun of spontaneously choosing a book.

Instead of overthinking the reading order, I may have just swapped that out with overthinking where the books look prettiest; but it was a valiant effort at improvement.

How do you decide what to read at Christmas? And what is your favorite Christmas book?

 And don’t overthink it!