This Christmas collection is both a travel and a time-travel book, leading you from gloomy but simpler medieval times through golden Renaissance and enlightened Age of Reason, from rich Hanseatic cities to gnomes' burrows and Santa's never-sleeping village, and from sophisticated princely courts to post-cold-war Berlin and behind-the-Iron-Curtain Eastern Europe.

Your guides on this journey will be cobblers' hammering sounds, the voices of Brothers Grimm, the howling of wolves outside the village, medieval tricksters, merry buccaneers and Goethe's spirit. You will march along with nutcracker soldiers, listen to the songs of cold-fingered minnesingers, fear the night of St Andrew winter-heart, partake in a New Year's divination ritual with dumb porridge, eat the world's largest fruit cake, wash it down with hot 'peppered paradox', go caroling with the three Magi on the 12th Day of Christmas, and meet the ghosts of Christmas past in the toy makers' workshops from the old Ore Mountains.

From merry and bright tones to dark Gothic shades, this is The Little Christmas Book, a photographic journey through several European Christmas markets and traditions, history, architecture, food culture and winter lore, the fifth "little book" in Chris Tudor's series, "Phototrotter Life: Travel Stories".