Merry Christmas from The Reader Organisation

We're sure most of you are wide awake by now, delving into your stockings and already filling up on festive food, so from all of us at The Reader Organisation, we'd like to wish you a very Merry Christmas.

Hopefully, Father Christmas will have left you some fantastic books underneath your tree (perhaps even some of our Best Reads of 2012 or the Books We'd Like To Find Under The Tree...). But we wonder whether for sheer bookish brilliance or otherwise just a very impressive way of recycling, the Christmas tree below can possibly be topped...?

And a Christmas wish from The Reader Online just wouldn't be complete without some seasonal poetry, so once you've unwrapped all your presents and tucked into your Christmas dinner, why not share this lovely poem around the table - one of our favourites from A Little, Aloud by Thomas Hardy:

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Glad tidings to one and all - and Happy Reading for the New Year!