A NEW CHRISTMAS TREASURY, edited by Jack Newcombe, Viking, 532 pages, $25.

This yuletide collection offers an array of 87 stories, sketches, vignettes, reminiscences and poems written by celebrated American and European authors. Prismatically, they reflect a diversity of emotions. Entries segue from J.M. Barrie’s spectral “The Ghost of Christmas Eve,” Fyodor Dostoyevski’s wrenching “A Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree,” Ogden Nash’s merry narrative poem, “The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t,” to “The Murder of Santa Claus,” a P.D. James whodunit never before published in the United States.

Nostalgia sweeps through the book like the Valkyries. “If you want to have a Christmas like the one we had on Paradise Farm when I was a boy,” says Robert P. Tristram Coffin in “Christmas in Maine,” “you will have to hunt up a salt-water farm on the Maine coast … and a road that goes around all sorts of bays, up over Misery Hill and down, and through the fir trees so close together that they brush you and your horse on both cheeks.”

He calls up the festive intimacy of the farmhouse, bright with bayberry boughs and everlasting roses, and the Christmas tree in the center of the sitting room, “the best fir tree of the Paradise forests … every bough in it … like old-fashioned fans wide open.” And he remembers that the tree was hung with presents and lighted with candles, a dangerous custom that he brushes off with “Boughs will take fire here and there … but there will be plenty of uncles around to crush out the small bonfires in their big brown hands.”

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (who died at the young age of 39) elaborates on his childhood memories in the 1945 BBC special, “Conversation about Christmas” in which he describes the “snow (that) grew overnight on the roofs of the houses … minutely ivied the walls, and settled on the postman, opening the gate. … And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they would not fight, could always run. … And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood on the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette and then, with a smirk, you ate it.”

Elegant Henry James puts in a brief appearance with the sculptured vignette, “Paris, Christmas 1876”; so also do Henry David Thoreau, solemn as ever, in his reflective “A Winter Walk,” James Thurber in a droll soliloquy about the American fetish for sending Christmas cards to even the most casual of acquaintances, and Aldous Huxley, who in “New-Fashioned Christmas” rails against the drift of the “Dickensian Christmas-at-home” to its canalization into crassly commercial channels.

O. Henry signs in with one of his surprise-ending gems, “Gifts of the Magi.” This wizard of the quirky plot twist (whose true name was William Sydney Porter) wastes no time in getting down to brass tacks: “One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And 60 cents of it was in pennies. … Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.” Sitting in her shabby New York flat, the pretty bride weeps with frustration. Where could she get the money for the Christmas gift she knew her Jim wanted so much? Suddenly she had the answer. “With a whirl of skirts she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.” The wizardry of O. Henry is now in high gear.

One of the most riveting selections is F. Van Wyck Mason’s gripping recreation of Christmas Eve at Valley Forge, 1777, when hoards of hungry, ragged men, dirty, cold and diseased, suffered their agony out of loyalty for one man — their commander-in-chief, Gen. George Washington. What they did not know was that in his tattered tent George Washington was in the depths of despair as he listened silently to his friend, Maj. Anthony Wayne, who said to him as he tramped back and forth “over the broken leaves, dead grass, and melting snow on the grimy canvas floor of the Commander-in-Chief’s tent, `Is it not now entirely plain that Congress has traduced and abandoned us? To disperse at once is our only recourse. Even so, hundreds will perish.’ ” Later that night, impelled by the truth of Wayne’s words, Washington picked up a quill and slowly began to write a letter addressed to the president of Congress: “Conscious of the Fruitlessness of further Contest with the Enemy and aware that my Army has been Abandoned to starvation and neglect by the various State Authorities and by the Congress itself, I have, sir, the Honour herewith to tender my resigna-” Here he stopped because just then something happened that changed the history of a fledgling nation.

The mission of this anthology (which opens with the Christmas Gospels of Matthew and Luke) was to explore the many configurations of Christmas. Compiler Jack Newcombe, a Vermont native, author, and one-time bureau chief of Life magazine, died last year, but this bright sampler of Christmas pieces lives on.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a regular feature in the monthly Books in Review section. Goodrich also writes a review column and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”