Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, Paulding wrote a number of Christmas tales, the best of which are brought together in this collection and which predate Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Paulding presents his stories as they have been translated from the original Dutch by a fictitious author. In them Saint Nicholas - a sixteenth-century Dutch Protestant baker - miraculously befriends those who uphold Dutch traditions and sets straight those who are either mean or given to "newfangled notions."