The Coventry Carol

I'm totally with Caspar when it comes to hating Christmas so I was a little hesitant to pick this up. Turns out, it has little to do with commercial American Christmas and more to do with dark magic and Nordic-esque lore.

Caspar is an orphan raised in the foster system with a giant chip on his shoulder in the shape of a Christmas tree. The book opens with him standing on a snowy bridge on Christmas Eve, drinking Fireball out of the bottle and staring into the dark water below, ready to end it. Nick shows up out of (literally) no where and stops him, promising it'll get better and offering to stay the night. Caspar is at the end of his rope so says, “Fuck it.” and they do just that. When he wakes up Christmas morning with no Nick in sight, and just a weird snow globe left on his nightstand, Caspar convinces himself it was a drunken dream and goes about his life - despite all the weird mystery gifts and memories he finds throughout the following months.
It takes another depressive episode on the same bridge for Nick to show again. By this time, we've learned that Nick isn't just an ordinary magician and is in fact the heir to Christmas, his father being Klaus the current actual Santa Claus. Only in this world, Santa is a bigot and a tyrant and resents his son's current obsession with a mortal man.

It's an interesting, darker take on Christmas with a rather sweet love story sprinkled in.