Between the turn of the twentieth century and 1980, the family camera did some of its most consistent work at Christmas. A Very Vintage Christmas, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2024, gathers that work: photographs of trees, turkeys, wrapped parcels and the faces arranged around them, made across roughly eight decades.

The mood shifts from page to page. A family poses stiffly behind its feast, the group arranged for the lens rather than the occasion. Women in fur coats examine hosiery in a 1950s department store. A small boy lifts a wooden rifle from beneath a tree. Some of it looks remote; some of it is barely different from last December. That double sensation — the strange and the familiar inside the same frame — is the book’s real subject.

Hoxton Mini Press gives it no single authorial voice. The credited contributor is Lucy Davies, who writes the introduction; the photographs themselves arrive as collected material, their makers unnamed. The result sits closer to an album than to a monograph, and it is the sequencing, rather than any individual picture, that carries the argument: Christmas is a ritual repeated with small variations, and the camera was how families kept a record of it.

For collectors of vernacular photography and photographic social history, the book earns attention on those terms. It is a compact hardcover of 144 pages, small enough to hold in one hand, and it treats an ordinary domestic subject with the seriousness usually reserved for larger themes. Where a survey of twentieth-century photography might step past the Christmas snapshot, this one asks what the genre was actually doing, year after year.