Here are eight decades of holiday cheer - plus the occasional comical coal in the stocking - in this collection of The New Yorker`s best seasonal stories, poems, commentary, and memoirs, illuminated with color reproductions of Christmas-themed covers and, of course, a healthy smattering of cartoons from all eras. Here are such classics as John Cheever`s 1949 story "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor", about an elevator operator in a Park Avenue apartment building who experiences the fickle power of charity; John Updike`s "The Carol Sing", in which a group of small-town carolers remember an exceptionally enthusiastic fellow singer ("How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom out when the male voices became King Wenceslas"); and Richard Ford`s acerbic and elegiac 1998 story "Crèche", in which an unmarried Hollywood lawyer spends an unsettling holiday with her sister`s estranged husband and kids. Here too are Perelman`s 1936 "Waiting for Santy", a playlet in the style of a Cliff Odets labor drama (the setting: "The sweatshop of Santa Claus, North Pole"), and Vladimir Nabokov`s heartbreaking 1975 story "Christmas", in which a father grieving for his lost son in a world "ghastly with sadness" sees a tiny miracle on Christmas Eve.