Short Christmas Stories for Kids: 8 Original Read-Alouds, With Ages and a Question for After

How do you pick a short Christmas story by age?

Pick by how long the child can sit and what they are ready to hold in their head. Ages 2 to 4 do best with one simple event and a soft ending. Ages 4 to 6 can follow a small problem with a solution. Ages 6 to 9 enjoy a story that does not wrap itself up too neatly. The table matches each of the eight stories below to an age and a mood.

If you are not sure, start with the one for the smallest listener in the room. After the story, ask the question printed under it and then stop talking: the answer is whatever your child says, including a shrug. For printed books, see our Christmas books for kids by age, and for a story in which your child is drawn into the pictures, the free preview takes about half a minute.

The Mitten on the Fence: a short Christmas story about a lost mitten

Ages 3 to 6. About 3 minutes aloud. A short story about noticing that someone, somewhere, is cold.

Nell found the mitten on the way home from school. It was sitting on top of a fence post, one fat green mitten with a loop of yarn at the cuff and a little cap of snow on its thumb.

Somebody had put it there on purpose. That is what people do with a lost mitten: they stand it up where its owner might look. But the snow was coming down thicker now, and a mitten with nobody in it is a cold sort of thing.

“Somebody's hand is cold,” said Nell.

“Probably,” said her dad. “Probably a hand that is already home.”

Nell did not think so. She lifted the mitten off the post and carried it the rest of the way inside her coat, against her sweater, where it would stay warm.

That night she set it on the radiator. In the morning she put it on her own hand. It was far too big. It came up past her elbow and flopped when she waved.

She knocked on four doors on Birch Lane. At the first, a boy said his mittens were blue. At the second, a lady said she had not worn mittens since before Nell was born. At the third, nobody came. At the fourth, a dog came, and then a man behind the dog, who looked at the mitten and said, “Not mine, but I know whose.”

He pointed down the road. The mail carrier was coming up the walk of the corner house with his left hand pushed deep into his coat pocket and his right hand sorting letters with every finger bare.

“That's the one,” said the mail carrier, when he saw it. “I thought it was gone for good. Three days I've been doing this with one hand.”

He slid the mitten on and wiggled his fingers. Of course it fit.

Nell had thought she might feel proud. Mostly she felt that her arm was cold. The mail carrier seemed to notice, because he dug into his bag and handed her a rubber band, which was all he had, and said it was for her hair, or for anything.

“How did you know to go looking?” he asked.

“I didn't,” said Nell. “I just knew somebody's hand was cold.”

“Most people see a mitten on a fence and think, somebody will come for it,” he said. “You thought, somebody's cold. Then he shook her hand with the green mitten, very seriously, and went on up the walk delivering the mail with two hands, which, Nell felt, was how mail was meant to be delivered.

Ask after: Have you ever found something that belonged to someone else? What did you do with it?

The First Footprint: a short snow story for a quiet morning

Ages 4 to 7. About 3 minutes aloud. A snow story for a child who wants to be first, and finds a nicer way to go second.

Owen woke before anybody else on the morning of Christmas Eve, and he knew right away that something was different, because the room was bright and quiet in a way it never was.

He went to the window. Snow lay over everything, smooth as a sheet pulled tight on a bed. No tracks. No tire marks. Not even a squirrel. The whole yard was a page nobody had written on, and Owen wanted more than anything to write on it first.

He put his boots on over his pajamas and his coat on over his pajama top. He opened the back door as slowly as he could so it would not creak. At the bottom of the step he stopped, with one boot in the air.

He looked at the snow. The snow looked back, white and perfect.

“If I step,” Owen said to nobody, “it's not new anymore.”

He put his boot back down on the step, and stayed where he was. He stood for a long time. His breath made small clouds. A branch let go of a little snow somewhere with a soft flump, and the yard held still afterward.

That was when he saw the line.

It started at the fence and went across the yard to the bird feeder: two small prints side by side, then two longer ones in front, then two small ones again. Hop, hop, hop. Someone had gotten up even earlier than he had.

Owen did not feel cheated. That surprised him. He felt something more like what you feel when you open the door and find that a friend has already arrived.

He stepped into the yard, and he walked next to the line, not on it, setting each boot down a careful hand's width away. Behind him the snow filled with a second line of prints, big and small, going the same way.

At the feeder the little prints turned and went under the hedge. Owen's went on to the feeder, where he knocked the snow from the lid and scooped out some seed from the bin and spread it on the ground for whoever came back.

The kitchen window slid up. “You'll freeze out there,” his grandmother called, half laughing. “You're in your pajamas!”

“I wasn't first,” said Owen. “But I was second, and I stayed beside.”

“That's a good place to be,” she said.

By lunch the yard would be crowded with sled tracks and cousins and tire marks and a mess of footprints nobody could tell apart. But for the moment there were just two lines, side by side, one small and one smaller, going the same way.

Ask after: Would you rather be the first one to walk in new snow, or walk beside someone? Why?

Wren and the Whisper: a short Christmas story about a shy reindeer

Ages 4 to 8. About 4 minutes aloud. A story for a child whose voice is small, and who is sometimes talked over.

The reindeer team had a lot of voices. Brass bellowed. Clatter shouted. Big Moss rumbled so deeply that the roof shook when he said good evening. Thistle sang, loudly, whether or not anyone had asked.

At the very back of the line was Wren, who was the smallest, and who spoke only in a whisper.

The back was simply where the smallest went. But a whisper does not get far in a team of bellowers, and Wren had learned to say very little, and to watch a great deal.

On Christmas Eve, on the roof of the very last house, the team waited while the driver in the red coat slipped down the chimney with the final sack. The reindeer stamped. Brass told a story about a gale, and Clatter said his had been worse.

Wren was watching the sleigh. She saw a ribbon flutter at the back, and then she saw the thing the ribbon was tied to: one last present, small and round, that had slid loose from the pile. It slid an inch, then another. It was heading for the edge of the roof, where the gutter dropped away into the dark.

“Stop,” whispered Wren.

Nobody heard, of course. Brass was telling the gale story.

She could not shout. Once, years ago, she had tried, and her voice had cracked and the whole team had looked round. The present slid another inch.

So Wren did the one thing she had always been good at, which was the small thing, close up. She leaned toward Big Moss, next to her, and whispered right into his enormous ear: “Moss. The present. It's sliding.”

Moss had never whispered in his life. But when somebody whispers to you, you find you whisper back. “Clatter,” he breathed, to the reindeer in front. “The present is sliding.”

“Thistle,” breathed Clatter. “The present.”

“Brass,” breathed Thistle, and for once she did not sing.

Down the line it went, from ear to ear, a whisper carried by every voice on the team. When it reached the front, Brass stopped in the middle of his gale. The whole team went still at the same moment, and the sleigh, which had been about to lift, stayed down. The driver, coming back up the chimney, put out a gloved hand and caught the present just as it reached the gutter.

“Who saw that?” he asked, looking at the row of reindeer.

Every head turned toward the back.

Wren did not get any louder after that, and nobody asked her to. But from then on, whenever the team had something small to say, something that mattered and could easily be lost, they said it to the one at the back first.

Ask after: Who is someone quiet that you listen to? What do they notice that other people miss?

Biscuit and the First Snow: a short Christmas story with a puppy

Ages 2 to 5. About 3 minutes aloud. A silly, soft story for the youngest listeners, and for a house with a pet in it.

Biscuit was nine months old and had never seen snow.

He had seen rain, which came down and made the grass wet. He had seen the sprinkler, which he thought was a fountain made just for him. But on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, something new began to fall outside the back door, and Biscuit stood with his nose against the glass and made a small, worried sound.

June, who was six, understood right away. “It's snow, Biscuit,” she said. “Wait till you feel it.”

She put on his red sweater. She put on her coat. Her dad opened the door.

Biscuit went out slowly, one paw at a time. The first flake landed on his nose. He sniffed it. It was gone. A second flake landed on his ear. Gone. A third on his back. Also gone.

This was upsetting. The whole sky seemed to be full of things that disappeared.

He barked at the sky. The sky did not stop. He ran in a circle to see whether the snow was following him, and it was. He jumped up and snapped at the air, and caught nothing, and caught nothing, and then, with a sound like a very small door closing, caught one. He chewed. He looked surprised. He did it again.

Then he put his front paws in the drift by the steps. It went all the way up to his chest. For a moment only his tail was showing, wagging, and then he came out of the drift with a white mustache and a look on his face of someone who has been told the best news in the world.

June laughed so hard she sat down in the snow.

Watching him, she realized something. She had seen snow every winter of her life, and she could not remember ever looking at it. She tipped her head back and put out her tongue. A flake landed there and was gone, cold and exactly nothing, and it tasted like the sky.

“Oh,” said June.

They stood in the yard together, a girl and a puppy, both with their tongues out, both looking up. At the kitchen window her dad took a picture, and then another one, and then put the phone down, because the picture was not as good as the real thing.

Later, Biscuit lay on the rug with his sweater still damp. His paws twitched in his sleep. He was still chasing it, somewhere, the whole sky of things that disappear.

Ask after: What is something you would like to see for the very first time all over again?

Dot Cries at the Tree: a short Christmas story about a new baby sibling

Ages 3 to 6. About 4 minutes aloud. A story for a new big brother or sister, or one who is about to be, that does not pretend it is all joy.

Sam was four, and his baby sister Dot was five weeks old, and everybody kept telling Sam he was a big brother now. They said it as though it were a hat he was supposed to wear all day.

On Christmas Eve the whole family came to the house. Grandma and Grandpa came. Uncle Raf came. Two aunts came with an enormous bag of cookies. Everyone wanted to hold Dot, and nobody wanted to hold Sam's bear, which was named Mister, so Sam sat on the stairs with Mister on his knee and watched the grown-ups pass his sister around like a warm loaf.

He was not jealous, exactly. He was just tired of being big.

At seven o'clock, Grandpa said it was time to light the tree. Everybody gathered. Grandpa counted down from three, and on one, the lights came on all at once.

“Ahhh,” said the whole family.

Dot screamed.

It was a huge scream, red-faced and furious, and it went on and on. Grandma bounced her. Uncle Raf made a face. An aunt tried a song. Dot screamed louder. They passed her from arm to arm, and nothing worked.

Sam watched from the stairs. He noticed something nobody else had. Dot's eyes were fixed on the tree, wide and wet, and her mouth was in the shape of someone who has just been surprised by the sun.

He knew that look. Last year, when the lights came on, he had hidden behind the couch for the same reason.

He climbed down. He walked through the legs of the grown-ups until he got to Grandma, and he held up Mister, right in front of Dot's face, so that the bear blocked the bright. “It's just the lights,” he told her. “They're a lot. You don't have to look.”

Dot hiccuped. She stared at the bear. Slowly, her fist came out of her blanket and took hold of Mister's ear.

The screaming stopped.

“Well, look at that,” said Grandma softly. Everyone looked at Sam, and Sam, who was four, did not say anything, because he did not think there was much to say.

Later, in the kitchen, his mom knelt down and asked, “How did you know what to do?”

“I was scared of them too,” said Sam. “Last year.”

Dot held on to Mister all through dinner. Sam let her. But when the pie came out, he walked over and took the bear back, because some things, even from a baby, you only lend until dessert.

Ask after: What is something you used to be scared of when you were little? What helped?

If a baby is on the way, we also wrote a guide to books for a new big brother or sister.

How do you make Christmas read-aloud time special?

You make read-aloud time special by making it the same every night, not by making it bigger: the same spot, the same low light, one story, and one question. The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages reading aloud with young children and describes it as a way to build loving, nurturing relationships. A small ritual is easier to keep up in a busy December than a big one.

• Best for the first week of December. One story a night, in a row, with the eight below as a countdown. Knowing tomorrow's story is coming gives bedtime something to look forward to.
• Best for a restless child. Turn off the overhead light and read by a lamp. Low light tells the room that the day is ending.
• Best for a child who stalls. Choose the story before the pajamas, not after, so the arguing happens early. For the rest of the routine, see our bedtime routine that ends the stalling.
• Best for Christmas Eve itself. Read the quietest story last, with the lights low. That is the job of the night-light story at the bottom of the list. More ideas for the evening are in our Christmas Eve traditions guide.
• Best for a child who loves to join in. Stop before the last word of a sentence and let them finish it.

Read the story to yourself once first and decide where you will slow down. Skip the voices: a plain, warm, unhurried reading is enough. And if your child wants the same story again tomorrow, read it again. For a printed book to keep, you can see your child drawn into one for free: the preview takes about half a minute, with no card and no account.

The Red Truck: a short Christmas story about giving something away

Ages 5 to 9. About 4 minutes aloud. A story about giving that does not tell a child how to feel about it.

In the week before Christmas, Jonah's school asked every child to bring one toy for a box. The toys would go to children who might not have many. His dad said to pick one he did not play with anymore.

Jonah looked along his shelf. There was a puzzle with a piece missing. There was a stuffed giraffe with a hole in its ear. There was a plastic dinosaur whose tail lived in a drawer.

He put the puzzle in the bag. Then he took it out again.

He sat on his bed and thought about a boy he had never met, opening a box on Christmas morning, working at a puzzle for an hour, and finding a hole at the end. That seemed a mean sort of surprise.

So he looked for something that worked. But everything on his shelf that worked, he played with. He did not have anything that was both good and unwanted. That was the problem.

At the end of the shelf, in the place of honor, was the red truck.

It was the biggest truck he owned. It had a lift on the back that really went up and down, and a button that made the headlights flash. He had taken it to the park and the bath and, one time, to Grandpa's birthday dinner, where he had kept it in his pocket. The red had worn off one corner.

He picked it up. He pressed the button. The lights flashed three times. He sat there for a long while.

Then he put it in the bag, quickly, before he could change his mind, and he did change his mind, and took it out, and held it, and put it back in.

His dad did not say a word. He had been going to, and then he had not.

At school he had to carry the bag up to the front himself, and put it into the box. It went in on top of a doll and a set of wooden blocks. His teacher said thank you. Jonah said “You're welcome” in a voice that didn't sound like his own.

In the car on the way home he said, “It feels weird.”

“I know,” said his dad. “It's supposed to feel like something.”

That night Jonah looked at his shelf. In the place of honor there was a space the exact shape of a red truck. He did not fill it. He left it empty all week, and at night he looked at it, and every time it seemed a little less like a hole and a little more like a doorway, though he couldn't have said where it led.

It was a strange kind of present, he thought. Most gifts fill up a space. This one made one.

Ask after: Is it harder to give away something you love, or something you do not need? Why?

Flat Cookies in Two Kitchens: a short Christmas story about a faraway grandma

Ages 5 to 9. About 4 minutes aloud. A story for a child whose grandparent lives far away, and about doing something together when you cannot be together.

Lena's grandmother lived three time zones away, and every Sunday at four o'clock they talked on the phone. This Sunday, the one before Christmas, Grandma Ruth had a plan.

“We're going to bake my sugar cookies,” she said. “You in your kitchen, me in mine, at the same time. I mailed you the recipe card.”

The card had come the day before, in an envelope with a stamp shaped like a snowflake. It was in careful slanted handwriting, Grandma's own mother's, and stained with butter at one corner.

Lena propped the phone against the flour bag, where she could see Grandma Ruth propped against hers. They tied on their aprons together. They creamed the butter and sugar together, one counting “one, two, three,” the other counting a half-second late, so the words kept stepping on each other.

The dough was sticky. Lena's was sticky, and Grandma's was sticky. “It's always like this,” said Grandma Ruth cheerfully. “You just add flour till it behaves.”

They rolled it out. They cut stars and one lopsided moon. They slid the trays in, and they sat down in their two kitchens and waited, talking about nothing, and Lena almost forgot that Grandma was not in the room.

When the timers rang, they took out the trays at the same moment and held them up to their phones.

The cookies were flat. They were not a little flat. They were flat as coins, with their edges all run together, so that the stars were one big star and the moon had melted into it.

Lena looked at hers, and then at Grandma's. They were exactly the same.

“Oh no,” said Grandma Ruth. “Oh no, oh no.”

“It's the card,” said Lena's mom, leaning over Lena's shoulder to read it. “Look. It says one cup of flour. It should say two. Grandma, your mother left out a cup.”

Grandma Ruth stared at her phone. Then she began to laugh. She laughed until she had to sit down, and then she laughed lying back in her chair with her apron over her face. “Fifty years,” she wheezed. “Fifty years I've been blaming my oven.”

Lena laughed so hard she got the hiccups.

They ate the flat cookies anyway, each in her own kitchen, holding them up to the camera like a toast. They tasted, Lena said, exactly right.

Afterward, she found a pencil. Under the line that said one cup, she wrote “two,” in her best handwriting. Under that she wrote “fixed by Lena and Grandma, on a Sunday,” and she put the card back in its envelope and mailed it to her grandmother, snowflake stamp and all.

Ask after: What could you and someone who lives far away do at the very same time?

If a grandparent is a big part of your child's Christmas, our guide to books about grandparents lists more.

The Night-Light in the Hallway: a short Christmas bedtime story

Ages 2 to 5. About 3 minutes aloud. The quietest of the eight, for the last story of the night. Read it slowly, and lower your voice a little with each paragraph.

The night-light in Hazel's room was shaped like a small moon. It had one job, and the job was to stay on.

On Christmas Eve, Hazel could not sleep.

She lay in bed with her eyes open, looking at the ceiling. From her place beside the door, the night-light could see the whole room: the bed, the window, the boots under the chair, the stocking hanging from the bedpost, waiting.

Out in the hall there were sounds. A floorboard creaked. A whisper, and another whisper, and the soft crackle of paper being handled very carefully by someone who did not want it to crackle.

“Is it tonight?” said Hazel, in a very small voice.

“Shh,” said the whisper in the hall. “Close your eyes.”

Hazel closed them. She opened them again.

The night-light did not say anything, because night-lights do not. But it did the thing it always did, which was to glow, evenly, without any fuss, like a promise someone had made a long time ago and had never once needed to repeat.

Hazel looked at it. She counted the sounds she could hear. The furnace, humming low in the basement. The snow, which made no sound at all but which she could feel out there anyway, settling. The tree downstairs, its lights ticking as they cooled.

The glow stayed the same. It had been on for every night of Hazel's life, and it had never once been asked to do anything more than this.

Her eyes began to feel heavy, and then heavier. The boots under the chair grew soft at the edges. The window grew soft. The stocking on the bedpost seemed to lean and sway and settle.

Sleep came the way it always comes, not all at once, but one thing at a time. First the boots. Then the window. Then the stocking. Then the dark, warm and deep.

And in the middle of the dark, a small round light, still on.

Ask after: What is the first sound you hear when the whole house gets quiet?

If your child needs the light on for good reasons all year round, see our guide to books for kids afraid of the dark.

What are the classic Christmas stories worth knowing?

Four classics are read aloud most often: A Visit from St. Nicholas, A Christmas Carol, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and The Gift of the Magi. All four first appeared before 1931, so they are in the public domain in the United States, whether first published here or abroad, according to the Cornell University Library chart. Here is each with its author, date and our view on age.

The age column is our opinion, not a rating. And a retelling is a different text from the original, so check the cover to see who wrote it. For picture books, see Christmas books for kids by age.

For the question of the most popular Christmas story, there is no official ranking. For many families it is the nativity account in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and in American homes A Visit from St. Nicholas and A Christmas Carol are retold in many forms. If you are choosing for a small child, the eight stories above are shorter than any of them.

Is there a Christmas story with your child on every page?

Yes. Dreamtale Cartoons, a small studio that has drawn about ten thousand families since 2020, makes The Last Present, a personalized hardcover for ages 3 to 10. Your child is drawn from one photo into a Christmas Eve story written in rhyme across thirteen spreads, drawn in the look of a modern 3D animated film.

Here is what happens in it. On Christmas Eve a hedgehog in mittens taps at the window: somebody has to check the sleigh at the end of the night, and there is always one package too many, and this year it has no name on it. Your child spends the snowy night looking for who it belongs to, past dark window after dark window, and finds it belongs to whoever stayed up wrapping everybody else's. Your child writes the name on the label themselves, and the book stops there.

It helps to be exact about what it is and is not. It is a story about giving, not a lullaby, so for the last story of a sleepless night the night-light one above is a better fit. The story is ours and is the same for every family who picks this title; what is yours is your child's face, their name in the words, and a dedication that you write and we print word for word on its own page. It sits next to the stories on this page, as a book to keep.

Every book is printed after you order it and checked by a real artist before it goes out, and for Christmas in the United States you should order by December 1. The book page and the cart show the real delivery dates before you pay. If you want to see how your child looks in it first, the free preview takes about half a minute, with no card and no account. For the wider picture of how these books work and how to choose one, see our guide to personalized books for kids. And if you are writing a card to go with the book, Christmas messages for kids has lines to copy.