***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bill Hamblin and I published the following column on 14 December 2013:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Owing to the huge immigration of villagers into rapidly growing cities caused by the Industrial Revolution, traditional observance of Christmas had been declining in England since the late 1700s. Leaving their ancestral customs and social networks behind, these new urban dwellers were often poor, and they worked long and exhausting hours in increasingly mechanized factories.<\/span><\/p>\nMoreover, their employers \u2014 of whom the fictional Ebenezer Scrooge is a fairly typical representative in this respect \u2014 weren\u2019t especially inclined to grant them paid leave on Christmas Day. Time is money.<\/span><\/p>\nWriters such as Sir Walter Scott, in 1808, and the American Washington Irving, in 1820, lamented the decline of English country Christmases. But others welcomed it. Conservative reformed Protestants, for example, regarded Christmas as unbiblical, dangerously Catholic (\u201cChrist\u2019s mass\u201d) and even immoral.<\/span><\/p>\nIn fact, during the brief interval when they ruled England under Oliver Cromwell in the mid-1600s, they actually abolished it \u2014 which isn\u2019t altogether surprising, given the drunkenness, hooliganism, extravagance and sexual license that (rather like some Mardi Gras festivities today) often accompanied rural English celebrations of Christmas in the 16th and 17th centuries.<\/span><\/p>\nBy the 1840s, however, many Englishmen were growing nostalgic for \u201cjolly olde England\u201d as it had existed before the arrival of the railroad and the dirty, noisy factories (William Blake\u2019s \u201cdark satanic mills\u201d) of rising industrial Britain. Charles Dickens, entering into middle age, was plainly among them. He wrote extensively and often about Christmas, far beyond the famous 1843 tale of Scrooge and those tutoring ghosts; his enormous audience demanded a Christmas article or story from him every year.<\/span><\/p>\nDickens\u2019 descriptions of Christmas plainly rest upon idealized memories of his own childhood, which was, actually, partially spent in a workhouse while his father languished in Southwark\u2019s Marshalsea debtors\u2019 prison. (Many of his stories are, in part, autobiographical.)<\/span><\/p>\nA hearty meal of goose or turkey, hot wine or cider, games, dancing, sleighs, carriages, country inns, good cheer and gifts, a loving family gathered around a blazing Yule log while all is cold outside \u2014 these are images of an essentially early Victorian rural Christmas that Dickens bequeathed to us and that still, for many, form the iconic visual image of the holiday. Even our common expectation that a proper Christmas greeting card depict snow may rest, to some extent, upon the fact that, rather unusually for his native climate, his first eight childhood Christmases were white.<\/span><\/p>\nCuriously, Christmas cards themselves seem to have their origin at about the same time, although they didn\u2019t really catch on and go into commercial production until about four decades later. The story is well documented: In 1843, Sir Henry Cole, too busy, he thought, to be able to write substantial Christmas letters to his friends, commissioned an artist to design decorated cards for him on which he would write brief notes. Sir Henry ordered a thousand of them \u2014 as it happened, many more than he needed \u2014 and sent the remainder to a stationer\u2019s shop on London\u2019s Old Bond Street for sale.<\/span><\/p>\nPerhaps strangely to us today, the celebrations in Dickens\u2019s \u201cChristmas Carol\u201d feature no Christmas trees. German-born Queen Charlotte introduced this new element of \u201ctraditional\u201d Christmas into the English royal household in 1800, but its popularity soared only after December 1840, when Queen Victoria\u2019s consort, Prince Albert, also from Germany, set up and decorated several trees in the royal palace. (Victoria and Albert had been married the previous February.) \u201cThat pretty German toy,\u201d as Dickens would eventually call it, fit in very nicely with the holly and the mistletoe that had formed part of mid-winter celebrations in Britain since the fifth century.<\/span><\/p>\nOne of the author\u2019s sons later recalled that, for Dickens, Christmas was \u201ca great time, a really jovial time, and my father was always at his best, a splendid host, bright and jolly as a boy and throwing his heart and soul into everything that was going on. . . . \u00a0And then the dance! There was no stopping him!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nIt\u2019s very largely thanks to Charles Dickens and his England that, despite the historical origins of Christmas \u2014 probably in the spring and certainly in a Mediterranean climate \u2014 modern Americans tend to celebrate Jesus Christ\u2019s Nativity as an idealized early Victorian mid-winter family feast. But there\u2019s much good in the holiday customs he helped to preserve and spread, because, as Dickens himself wrote of the repentant Ebenezer Scrooge, \u201che knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 Here\u2019s a rather moving reminder of, and an invitation to, the 2018 First Presidency Christmas devotional, which takes place this weekend: \u00a0 https:\/\/www.lds.org\/church\/events\/2018-first-presidencys-christmas-devotional?lang=eng&_r=1 \u00a0 And, by the way, you can watch the First Presidency devotional and still listen to the Interpreter Radio Show! \u00a0 *** \u00a0 We were in Cairns just a few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[56,2517,2514,2523,2526,2520],"class_list":["post-67917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-book-of-mormon","tag-christmas","tag-dickens","tag-light-the-world","tag-scholarship","tag-victorian"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>