Christmas Reading

Why do we read the things we do at Christmas? For some reason, I often find myself rereading Connie Willis' The Domesdaybook at Christmastime, which, seeing as it's mostly about the bubonic plague, seems like an odd choice. But then, it's not, because it's set at Christmas, and there's a kind of leitmotif of churchbells ringing through it and there are two parallel stories of a flu epidemic in Oxford enough in the future to enable time travel and then the plague story in the Oxford at the time when the plague broke out. And it's about the triumph of human love and kindness and hope in the face of horror, which I suppose is what Christmas should be about, too.