Christmas traditions as we know them were originally the creations of three people in England, in a happy conjunction of effort at about the same time. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's German husband, is usually credited with the introduction of Christmas trees into England in the 1840s, but the Queen herself was half-German, and presumably knew of this custom of a decorated tree: her growing family always had one.
In 1611 James I had been sent Christmas cards, but the practice failed to catch on. The Royal Mail began only in 1840 with the introduction of the Penny Black stamp, which meant that the sender of the letter henceforth bore the cost of postage.
Commercially minded public servant Sir Henry Cole, anxious to increase the nascent post office's business, hit upon the idea of greetings cards, and had an artist friend design one. At a shilling each, they were expensive: note that Charles Dickens's Scrooge, for example, paid clerk Bob Cratchit 15 shillings a week. But such is the value of novelty that they were a sell-out from the start.
It was also in 1843 that Dickens published A Christmas Carol, his first and most famous Christmas story, which has never been out of print. He published four more similarly-themed novels during the next five years, but then turned his attention to weekly magazines such as Household Words. Even so, he still wrote stories centred on 'the great birthday', and included them in the weekly publications. I have just finished reading one such: What Christmas is as We Grow Older, which appeared in 1851.
Dickens was a prolific writer, and one of patchy quality: the threat of sentimentality was never far away, so that this brief work is not one of his best. But in this consumer age it is salutary to have his definition of the Christmas spirit, which is one 'of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance'. He places emphasis on the last two, and also dwells on the matter of the unaccomplished visions of our youth, and ponders whether we might not be better off because of the failure of these dreams.
But dreams always have a place, a 'shelter underneath the holly', and so do those people lost and gone. Much of this essay is about memory, and Dickens teaches what we all must learn, the fact that the older one grows, the more important memory becomes.
So I