Embalming the Yuletide Spirit : THE FRUGAL GOURMET CELEBRATES CHRISTMAS, <i> By Jeff Smith Morrow: $25; 298 pp.)</i>

The other day I trekked down an apartment corridor to visit friends and blundered into a seasonal ambush: Merely approaching within two feet of their neighbors’ front door triggers an automatic assault of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” audible probably to most of our Zip Code area. It’s a perfect match for the Yuletide spirit as embodied, or embalmed, in the Frugal Gourmet’s latest.

It is true that Jeff Smith has a lot of help here, in the form of a production team that has plastered together a non-stop sequence of plush, warm-toned photographs (mostly by Louis Wallach), original woodcuts (by David Frampton), and Smith family snapshots and art reproductions, all ably deployed on large, glossy pages to help conceal how little book there is in this book. Still, the basic artificiality of the thing is all his. You picture a technician lighting up labeled switches on a console, reaching effortlessly from “Gifts,” “Christ Child” and “Roast Goose” to “Tree,” “Santa Claus” and even--lest anyone forget other tappable markets--”Hanukkah” and “Seasonal Depression and Letdown.”

Some parts of the effort show more care than others. The big strength of the Frugal Gourmet books is always that the recipes are a well-calculated medley, written in a plain, unintimidating style and looking as if someone had worked to iron out bugs. (Smith offers due credit to “my cook, Craig Wollam.”) This time some obvious bases of a holiday-season collection are covered--candied citrus peel, gingerbread men, hard sauce, mincemeat, Hanukkah potato pancakes--and there are a few roads less traveled, such as a Swedish dinner of home-corned pork, sauerkraut, split peas with bacon and mashed root vegetables.

The recipes alone might have been enough to carry the book if there had been more of them. As it is, there are only about 75 at an optimistic estimate, and those with some plausible Christmas connection are still fewer. Look at the whole, chapter by chapter, and it’s clearly just the skeleton of a Christmas recipe-collection: A handful of cookies, four holiday roasts with trimmings, three puddings, and two fruitcakes account for an awful lot of this. Examined recipe by recipe, some turn out to be less than masterly, like the “hot buttered rum mix” that resembles a super-sugared milkshake base, the gravies liberally helped out with Kitchen Bouquet and Maggi seasoning, or a beef stock that features meatless bones simmered 12 hours (a sure prescription for a gluey effect that will haunt anything made with it).

Of course, the recipes are not meant to stand alone but to go along with all sorts of Christmas lore, personal reminiscences and thoughts of the season, and if these added up to anything worthwhile, the hither-and-yon smattering of food would be just fine. They don’t. They are the very incarnation of the word “slipshod.”

If nothing else told you that this is really a non-book, the organization (for want of a better word) would. The last two thirds are a motley heap of stuff shoved in under any convenient rubric, from “Our Family Christmas” (which gives Smith a chance to re-air a long-ago letter to one of his kids about the meaning of family tradition) to “Christmas Bells.”

The first part is worse. It centers mostly on the Nativity scene as presented through an Italian creche in the author’s possession, with all photographable figures (and a couple of imagined ones) given separate little blurbs and even menu suggestions. Joseph gets humble brown bread; the innkeeper, (“probably a rather kind man after all”) barley soup; the angels, a dish of angel-hair pasta (representing “the wheat of the earth”) with porcini and whipped cream (“their clouds of travel”); the sheep, “a nice green salad,” the Wise Men’s camel, a bowl of dates.

Any charm in this conceit (it might have some in other hands) is obliterated by spiels so shoddy that one wonders how they survived even one fact-checker. Thanks all the same, but I’d prefer not to be lectured on ecclesiastical history by a minister who thinks St. Francis of Assisi founded “a wonderful order of monks”--make that Friars, a crucial distinction--or puts in gratuitous scholarly touches such as: “The word ‘angel’ comes from the Biblical word for ‘messenger,’ evangelium. “ Any seminary student knows, or used to, that evangelium means “gospel” and that both it and “angel” come from the Greek angelos, “messenger.”

Name the subject and Smith is there on the spot with some error, muddle, or barefaced invention. Culinary history? “Chickens were not known in Palestine, a thought that is difficult for us to imagine.” (Just how did Peter realize that he had betrayed Jesus?) Rice, which really would have been unknown or rare, is casually tossed in with a medley of ingredients that “would have been common in a kitchen in Bethlehem.” English etymology? We’re told that the word “sheep” is both singular and plural “since sheep are totally communal in their life-style, just as we are supposed to be.”

Literature? Smith cheerfully presents 53 lines from W.H. Auden’s 1600-line poem “For the Time Being” as if they were the whole thing, and gets the title wrong. (The name he cites, “A Christmas Oratorio,” is actually the subtitle.)

Agriculture gets some doozies too. When he isn’t explaining that a ewe is “a momma sheep,” the author is treating us to such farm lore as: “The donkey was standing in the manger, watching the birth. Oh, all right, he was probably an ass, the ancestor of what we call the donkey.” It really should take no degree in asinology to know that a donkey and an ass are the same thing. (And I sincerely hope Smith meant “standing at the manger.” A manger with a donkey in it makes an even worse cradle than one without a donkey in it.)

An honest blunder or two is one thing. A string of inspirational blather spun out without bothering to get simple facts straight--even the “family traditions” letter unconcernedly confuses one father-son disagreement over dressing with another about gravy--is something else. The most offensive errors of all are those with an air of buttering up target groups.

Women, for instance. There’s one unforgettable paragraph beginning, “Medieval artists usually portrayed the angels as feminine,” explaining this out-and-out fabrication in terms of “the feminine aspect of truth,” and lastly presenting as a lovable anomaly a Rembrandt etching wholly unconnected with the Christmas story in which the artist depicted angels with unmistakably male features. (He’d better have. Those particular angels are explicitly said to have appeared to the patriarch Abraham as “three men.”)

Now, that’s economy--to condescend to women, Christian belief and a great artist in one breath while saying nothing true about any of them.

All in all, “The Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas” is a work to put one in mind of Dickens. Not, to be sure, the great novelist’s stories of struggling people making room for a little joy in their lives. What might be closer to the mark is the tribe of the Reverend Mr. Chadband in “Bleak House,” of whom it is too much to expect that they would let the holy story speak for itself; that they “would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest aid.”