There is a particular kind of December evening that exists mainly in the imagination of people who like books: dark outside by four, something warm to drink, a tree lit in the corner, and several uninterrupted hours with a novel.
It is an achievable evening, but it requires a little staging. The room has to be built for it.
Why the Tree Matters to Readers Specifically
A Christmas tree is, functionally, a very large and slightly chaotic lamp. It fills a room with low, warm, directionless light at exactly the time of year when the alternative is either darkness or an overhead bulb.
That quality of light is enormously conducive to reading, provided you do not try to read by it. Tree light is atmosphere light. It makes a room feel enclosed and intimate, which is precisely the state of mind in which long novels get finished. You still need a proper reading lamp, but what the tree does is make the rest of the room recede.
The Practical Case for Artificial
For a reading room, an artificial tree has specific advantages that have little to do with the usual arguments.
It does not drop needles into the pages of a book left open on the arm of a chair. It does not need watering, which means you are not getting up every other day. It does not change shape over the month, so the corner you arranged in late November is the same corner in early January. And it goes up whenever you decide, which for anyone who treats the dark half of November as the start of reading season is not a small thing.
It also means you can position it for the room rather than for the tree’s sake. A real tree has to go where it can be watered and where the needle drop is manageable. An artificial one can go wherever the light works best, which in a reading room is usually diagonally opposite the chair, so the glow is in your peripheral vision rather than reflecting off the page.
Building the Corner
The components are straightforward and the arrangement matters more than the spend.
A chair with proper back support, because two hours in a decorative armchair is punishment. A side table large enough for a mug, a book and the one you are about to start. A reading lamp positioned behind and slightly to one side of your shoulder, so the light falls on the page rather than into your eyes. A blanket, obviously. And the tree, set at a diagonal where it is visible but not in your sightline.
Slim trees work particularly well for this, because a reading corner is usually a corner, and a full-profile tree eats the floor space the chair needs. A tall, narrow tree gives you the vertical presence without the footprint. Comparing the slim and pencil shapes in the Dobbies artificial tree range against the full profiles is the quickest way to see how much difference the base width makes to a small room.
The Light Temperature Question
This matters more for readers than for most people.
Cool white tree lights are crisp and modern and they fight with warm reading lamps, producing a room with two competing colour temperatures that feels subtly wrong without anyone being able to say why. Warm white, ideally at the amber end, sits comfortably alongside a standard reading lamp and reads as candlelight.
Avoid twinkle and chase settings entirely if you intend to read in the room. Intermittent light in peripheral vision is genuinely distracting and will pull your eye off the page every few seconds. Steady, always.
What to Actually Read
December reading divides into two camps.
The first is seasonal: ghost stories, which have a long and specifically British Christmas tradition going back well before Dickens; the obvious Victorian novellas; and the cosy crime that publishers now reliably produce for the Christmas market. The British Library’s collections and seasonal writing on the Christmas ghost story tradition are a good starting point if you want to follow that thread properly rather than just reading the famous one again.
The second camp is the long novel you have been putting off all year, on the grounds that December is the only month with enough evenings in it. This is the more ambitious approach and it has a higher failure rate, but when it works it is the best reading of the year.
If you want structure, The Reading Agency runs reading challenges and supports reading groups across the UK, and a winter challenge is a reasonable way to turn good intentions into finished books.
A Note on Books as Decoration
Stacking books under the tree instead of presents has become a design trend, and it photographs beautifully. It is also slightly maddening to anyone who actually reads, since the books are invariably arranged by spine colour and nobody is permitted to take one out.
A more satisfying version: wrap a small stack of books you genuinely intend to read over the holidays, put them under the tree, and open one on each of the quiet days between Christmas and New Year. The tradition exists in Iceland as the Jólabókaflóð, the Christmas book flood, and it is comfortably the best Christmas custom any country has produced.
Where the Books Go
A reading corner needs its books within arm’s reach or the whole arrangement defeats itself.
A low shelf or a small stack beside the chair is better than a tall bookcase across the room, because the point is that you do not have to get up. Keep the current book, the next one and one wildcard within reach, and leave the rest of the library where it lives.
Avoid putting books directly underneath a tree with real foliage or a watered stand, for obvious reasons. With an artificial tree this is one fewer thing to think about, which is a small advantage that becomes apparent the first time you leave a hardback open on the floor for a week.
Sound and Silence
One underrated element of a December reading room is what it sounds like. A tree adds nothing acoustically, but it does change what the room is for, and a room built for sitting still tends to get quieter by agreement rather than by instruction.
If you need something, instrumental music at low volume is far less distracting than anything with lyrics, and a great many readers find that the same album repeated becomes effectively inaudible after twenty minutes, which is the desired outcome. The alternative, which is the superior one, is simply the sound of a house with the television off.
The Point of All of It
None of this is really about the tree. It is about building one corner of one room, for six weeks of the year, that is so obviously designed for sitting still with a book that sitting still with a book becomes the path of least resistance.
Most of us do not read less because we have stopped wanting to. We read less because every room we own is optimised for something else. December is a reasonable time to fix that, and a lit tree in the corner is a surprisingly effective place to start.