Goethe confessed: "I really love this time of year, the songs that are sung; and the cold that has set in makes me completely happy." But how did the poet and privy councilor spend the holiday? In 1800, he gifted his son August a puppet show that reminded him of his own childhood in the Frankfurt patrician house. His wife Christiane, on the other hand, was most delighted with the "little box" containing presents from Frankfurt. And Wilhelm von Humboldt, who visited Goethe for Christmas in 1826 in Weimar, reported after a Christmas visit, astonished: "I saw him consume such a portion of bundt cake with the wine in the morning..." The Goethe expert Werner Völker has gathered testimonies from contemporaries and the poet's own accounts about the holiday from letters, stories, and poems in this volume, complemented by visual documents from the time of Goethe: Christmas.