Every Christmas Eve since Betsy Cordes was a child, her dad would pull out a cracked red, cloth-bound 1915 collection of stories and plays and read the charming Victorian tale of Mr. Dog, a rascal who poses as Santa Claus to give gifts to his forest friends ’Possum, ’Coon and Crow. [...] for all these years, they seemed to be the only family on their block, or in the Bay Area, or possibly the country familiar with the obscure story of “Christmas at the Hollow Tree Inn,” written in 1898 by Albert Bigelow Paine, a friend and biographer of Mark Twain, and long out of print. [...] thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, Cordes has brought Mr.