*Audio Intro*

Come all Ye Faithful,

Joyful and Triumphant

Host

Quick note to listeners. This is the conclusion of our three part series, The Holiday the World Needed. There’s so much leading into this episode. If you’re just now joining, we recommend starting with Episode 1 where it all began.

*Audio*

Come and behold him

Born the King of Angels

Come Let Us Adore him.

Host

One of the first computerized drawing programs was MS Paint. I was in third grade when my class started visiting the computer lab and getting to play this was our reward. When I was really good, I’d be allowed to draw – which I’ve never been good at, but I’ve also never given up on believing that maybe my style has its own elegance.

In Paint, I’d choose the pen tool and then doodle loops all over the page. Then I would go and select Flood Fill. Flood fill, as a tool was mesmerizing – one button that color the inside of any object. I’d select green and go to an area of looped ovals and carefully select individual pieces. But inevitably there was this one loop that was just one pixel off from being closed or my pointer would slip just a bit over the line, and suddenly the entire screen was turned green.

Choose red and find other circles to fill in and then bam, just a bit off. And the screen was red. Gold. Same thing. I was trying to make clusters of color, but each time the color to end up spreading everywhere, even though I was trying to do that.

In the same way, a new Christmas was able to gather together all these global traditions and finally become recognizable as our modern version.

There wasn’t a committee defining what the holiday should be. There were just points for these small traditions that have been tucked away in corners of the world, came to light and happened to perfectly align with the sensibilities that we collectively agreed were part of an ideal Christmas. Like MS Paint t, just circles of color and then boom color everywhere or Christmas trees, or presents, or even Santa Claus.

And here right now is where everything begins filling in the shape of our modern Christmas.

This is creating Christmas, the holiday the world needed. Part three.

*Audio*

Host

Right here. Just about 1820. This is where winter celebrations meet with our new outlook of society, and we collectively define Christmas.

Within the next 40 to 50 years, Christmas would gather just about every single element we now associate with the holiday. I’d argue that everything we celebrate today is just a take on what was included and excluded within the 19th century Christmas.

So are you ready to make Christmas?

Bruce David Forbes

I’m Bruce. I’m a professor emeritus of religious studies at Morningside College, although now it’s known as Morningside University.

So I think there were three things that bring Christmas back. One is Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol. Second is Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their example. And the third is Saint Nicholas coming to the United States and morphing into Santa Claus, who becomes endearing for children but also really good for merchants in terms of selling things.

And if you put all three of those together, what happens is Christmas becomes across the culture juggernaut.

Host

Here we are right at the start of the avalanche of adoption. Adoption, not an invention. The symbols and characteristic that society is going to choose to bind to Christmas, by and large, weren’t invented at this point. They just became popular, really popular. They were presented in a light that resonated deep within us across borders and cultural lines. And we all … seem to just know that in each of these elements, there was a kernel of Christmas.

This might be why that even as some of the traditions were in their infancy only a few years old, maybe people believed that these things have been part of their own personal Christmas their whole life.

And I want to point this out: we also rejected ideas collectively in kind of the same way, which I think even further proves that we as a society knew what our new Christmas was even before we had really experienced it.

I mean, take for instance, Christmas symbols. When greeting cards began to spread, illustrators tried all sorts of imagery – including ocean scenes, insects and butterflies. But these sorts of holiday pictures – that seem crazy to us now – they all disappeared within a matter of years because we knew what we wanted in our winter holiday.

Anyway, here, this is where we are, and it starts with…

*Audio Cue*

Ho Ho Ho

Host

… we have Irving’s Knickerbocker book in 1809, the St Nicholas Society in New York City and Irving Sketchbook in 1820.

Then we get this poem that spreads holiday cheer like wildfire.

Audio Narration “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse.

Host

A visit from Saint Nicholas – now most commonly known as Twas the Night Before Christmas – was first published in 1823. As I mentioned in the last episode, it can be hard to wrap our heads around the impact of a book or poem looking at today’s world. Even the biggest movies that come out today don’t penetrate all of society. But that’s exactly what a visit from Saint Nicholas did.

It was and still is, the best known poem in the English language. It was republished in newspapers nearly every year for over a decade. We might have had a gift, bring character within the winter holiday season for thousands of years, but it was this one astoundingly popular poem that coalesced all previous versions into the shape of our Santa.

Even though the name used is still Saint Nicholas. But is this really a version of our Santa?

I mean, for you, when you read it, do you really think about it? Our first definitive step into the world of Santa Claus doesn’t actually paint the picture we think of. I mean, I remember reading it in grade school and having trouble making sense.

This first Santa is a tiny elf.

Audio Narration “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

When what, to my wondering eyes, should appear but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.

He was chubby and plump, a ripe, jolly old elf…

Host

We’re going to devote an entire episode to Santa Claus later in the season. But for now, we can tell that the details of our Santa Claus have changed quite a bit. Still, the essence of Santa is in here. The reindeer have names.

Audio Narration “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

Now Dasher. Now, Dancer, now Prancer and Vixen.

Host

Santa comes on Christmas Eve.

Audio Narration “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house…

Host

Santa is simply fun. There’s no Krampus or bag of cold.

Audio Narration “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

A wink of his eye and a twist of his head.

Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

Host

Going back to the evolution of society’s view on children and the romantic ideals of childhood, this new Saint Nick is in line with the evolving middle class values, and it represents one more shift that we haven’t touched on. As Krampus, Belsnickel, and Black Pete all fade away beneath the wide adoption of this lovable Saint Nick, our holiday underlines that children are good now.

Angela Platt

Hi, I’m Angela Platt. I am a PhD student at Royal Holloway University of London. I’m a historian, so I’m investigating history, and I’m also an associate lecturer in the humanities.

If you were to think about childhood, sort of in early modernity, children were perceived as wicked and embroiled in original sin. Corporal punishment was emphasized. They had to be disciplined their wills had to be broken.

And literature would emphasize that. I mean, if you look at some of the literature, pieces of literature, written for children in the early 1700s and indeed in the 1600s, it is very harrowing. It emphasizes how they’re going to go to hell if they don’t be good children and do the right thing. So very much emphasizing the need for corporal punishment and discipline.

In the romantic era, the views towards children are changing. One influence and that is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who suggested that instead of emphasizing corporal punishment, we should let children have their own experience that’s unrestrained, grounded in nature. And these new ideas accompany this in which children and childhood was viewed nostalgically.

So children started to be viewed as something that was more romantic – Children were viewed as innocent, they hadn’t yet been touched by the chaos. And so children were sentimentalized in a very significant way.

Host

How did this focus on this new childhood, this romanticized childhood? How did it affect the lives of the adults?

Angela Platt

The Victorians were looking back to the medieval era of Christmas, the way it was celebrated in the medieval past, and they were reimagining it nostalgically. And so they were looking to this past, even if the past didn’t actually exist that way, and they were reimagining traditions and practices in a way which was coherent with this middle class respectability and this middle class morality, which was increasingly focusing on the child. Which absolutely affected adults because it gave adults space to reconnect with their childhood.

And this was especially important for men. So emotional expectations of this time – it was seen as not masculine to be excessively nurturing or playful with your children. But things such as Christmas gave fathers the opportunity to perhaps become children again. And this is especially noted by historian John Tosh, where he talks about how men could enter into the symbolic world with children and men could nostalgically reflect upon their own childhood.

And this was played out as fathers sort of played the Father Christmas or Santa Claus role at Christmas Time and giving gifts, gifts to his children as a symbol for his provision of labor for the family.

Host

Everyone’s experience of Santa is different. I grew up completely believing in him. Maybe you did, too. And maybe you didn’t. Or maybe you have mixed feelings, whatever your experience was. I want to maybe start to reframe the way we think about Santa – here. And I want to lean into this idea that we created all of our holidays. We created Christmas and our holiday forefathers heard about Santa here, in the early 1820s, and they all universally embraced the story.

Just like they would every other tradition that finds its pop culture roots within this very small window of time. Maybe in that we can find a way in which all of this is real…

But we don’t have Santa yet. We have the makings of Santa. And Twas the night before Christmas had a massive impact on his shape, his trajectory, what would become the Santa experience. But as we mentioned in the last episode, changing the annual gift giver was not the work of one genius author. This was an author tapping into the zeitgeist.

Other authors with much less popular books and stories, we’re bringing the idea of Santa Claus together in similar ways. Many of these other holiday stories began popping up in presents as gifts to children and friends slowly became normalized.

The first popular presents or gift books.

Period Voice Over

Soon it’s time for Christmas shopping. This is the time when hardly any customer in a shop is buying something for himself.

Host

Now anthology books, given its presents, started around the end of the 1700s, but the 1820 saw the trend change as book publishers turn the practice into its own industry. Launching the gift book. The gift book was an all new type of product.

Published only at the end of the year. These books were annual collections of stories, poems and pictures. They’re a new idea and market change in our Gift-Giving practices because gift books were specifically purchased to be given away to someone else. They’re actually the first product to be created just for this, which is why they were only released around the Gift-Giving season.

Targeting this new product is something special and reserved just for gifting. Book publishers changed their advertising and we actually start to see marketing for these begin as far back as October.

So even only a few decades into the 1800s, the Christmas shopping season is already being pushed back. Really just as the idea of a holiday shopping season is taking shape, it’s already becoming something considered months-long.

Judith Flanders

I’m Judith Flanders. I’m a social historian. I focus primarily on the 19th century in Britain, but I have been known to go back to prehistoric times when necessary.

In the late 18th century. You can see ads in the paper from October-ish for Christmas presents and what they often wear more commonly then – New Year’s presents. So I think that the idea that it’s all become terribly commercial and now we advertise so early and people didn’t do that dee-da-dee-dum, what a pretty song…

…None of that is really true.

Host

Here in the 1820s to 1830s, We’re seeing the very beginning of commercialized gift buying. We’re leaving behind homemade presents and also shifting away from need based gifts.

Think about that. Up until the Industrial Revolution. If you want to give someone a gift, you can give them just about anything because they probably needed it. Food, drinks, pants – they were all great gifts because at some point soon the receiver would probably need them.

Now we’re just on the fringes of a tipping point where need wasn’t what gifts were meant to satisfy. And of course that would change presents and shopping and industry and Christmas. After the break, the 1840s, possibly the most significant decade for Christmas ever.

*Audio*

Oh, Christmas is a part of me.

Oh, Christmas is a part of me.

Oh, Christmas is a part of me.

*Ad Break*

Host

Welcome back to the 1840s where our snowball becomes an avalanche.

By the end of this decade, the Western world will have settled on all the cornerstone traditions that are still the pillars of our annual Christmas today. And I’m not talking about the esoteric shape of a child centered family holiday – that was already established. I mean, the things of Christmas. From here will go into the 1850s with Christmas trees, Christmas turkey, gift cards, family presents.

In fact we actually enter the next era with an official holiday. In the U.S., individual states began setting aside Christmas as an official holiday as early as 1845.

Of course, not everyone would take up the celebration rituals at the same time. I’ve made this sort of disclaimer before, as the Industrial Revolution changed society. But in comparison to the gradual changes of life during the Industrial Revolution, these traditions were become widely accepted and practiced at a breakneck pace.

The split between middle class and lower class celebration styles was narrowing. The imagery and wishes of Christmas were quickly being universally accepted. But there was division in the ability of lower classes to join in the new holiday, the way the middle and upper classes had.

We haven’t talked about the working class lifestyle throughout the Industrial Revolution very much, but we can’t avoid it any longer because the guy that many people have called the ‘Inventor of Christmas’ only did what he did because of his wish to change the plight of this specific group of people that were having a much harder life in the industrialized world.

In fact, what he would call a sledgehammer blow to the system of poverty in England would for us fall between a ghost story and the legend of Christmas.

Audio Reenactment of “A Christmas Carol”

Merry Christmas Uncle. God save you.

I don’t think it’s Christmas. Humbug.

Christmas, humbug? Uncle, you don’t mean that, I’m sure.

What reason to have you to be merry you’re poor enough.

Cindy Sughrue

My name is Cindy Sughrue, and I’m the director at the Charles Dickens Museum in London.

Dickens was…he was a phenomenon. He wasn’t just a writer of fiction, but he was a social reform campaigner. He did a phenomenal amount to raise awareness of contemporary issues and life in society to others and to try to effect change.

So thinking more about Dickens’ as London, it was this huge metropolis that had rapidly expanded from the start of the 19th century, and poverty was rife throughout all of Britain’s industrial cities and certainly in London, and families absolutely relied on children, including very young ones, to help make ends meet. And children were a cheap and largely unregulated form of labor.

So children could be found working in really dangerous environments, like coal mines and factories. So Dickens had long wanted to protest against the situation, and he’d been planning to write a journalistic piece a political pamphlet, but I suppose the seeds of the idea of a Christmas Carol were cemented in his mind during the autumn of 1843 when he visited a ragged school in London and also made a trip to Manchester, an industrial town in the north of England.

This visit played an important part in shaping the key themes of A Christmas Carol. In the section of the book where Scrooge is haunted by the Ghost of Christmas present, he’s shown an industrial town and this is clearly a description of Manchester. And he visits an array of people, including going to a miner’s home and seeing them preparing for their own Christmas celebrations. And of course, Scrooge is also shown the poverty of his own clerk in his counting house, Bob Cratchit and the Cratchit family home.

Audio Reenactment of “A Christmas Carol”

Ghost of Christmas Present : This is the house of your clerk, Bob Cratchit,

Scrooge : but he has hardly a penny to his name.

Cindy Sughrue

So it was absolutely fascinating to see how his own childhood experience, what he was seeing on his own doorstep in London and what he was seeing across industrial cities across Britain. And that he felt he had to find a way to do something to make a difference. And I think what’s crucial about Christmas Carol, is when that spark of an idea came to him – that he would write a story for Christmas, a time when people would gather together to celebrate and be thankful for what they had and and try to find some lightness and relief during the darkest month of the year – he knew that this would be a time that he could get his message across, perhaps to a larger group in society, a larger readership than he would do if he produced his original intention of a political pamphlet.

Host

So the books published in 1843. Now was it a success right away or did it take time to become popular?

Cindy Sughrue

The impact was immediate and astonishing. I think the fact that, you know, it went into multiple reprints and stage adaptations, it sparked enormous interest both in the story and the transformation of Scrooge. But it also sparked incredible revival of Christmas traditions and added momentum to charitable giving, that sense of, of needing to help those who have less.

Host

Charity. Helping the working class. This was the reason why Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol.

Our episode presents Gift Giving later in the season dives into this aspect of Christmas. Charles Dickens put momentum behind the movement to help the lower class, especially around Christmas. And charity became a part of our Christmas. To me, this conversation within Cindy Sughrue changed the way I feel about a Christmas Carol – it made the story something immediate – and I hope you take the chance to hear much more in Presents, gifts and giving.

For right now, we’re going to look at Charles Dickens and a Christmas Carol through the lens of something I said earlier, the idea that Dickens is the father of Christmas.

Judith Flanders

What Dickens did with A Christmas Carol, which nobody had done before was this wasn’t Washington Irving’s to Yorkshire Squire? It wasn’t the upper classes. It wasn’t even the wealthy middle classes. This was about working class people living in a city. So, for the first time, you’ve got the story of Christmas being told in the kind of society you’re living in.

It’s urbanized. It’s among working class people – who rush in for Christmas dinner from work.

Audio Reenactment of “A Christmas Carol”

Mrs Cratchett : No, your father will do that when he comes. What’s gotten your precious father and your brother Tiny Tim?

Cratch Kid : And Martha wasn’t as late last year by half an hour.

Judith Flanders

Now it’s a family and it’s child centered. It still focuses as Christmas still very heavily did on food and drink.

We haven’t got the mass market Christmas. We haven’t got the mass market presents. But it’s not now a holiday of neighbors dropping in on big parties.

It’s about the small unit, the family, and they’re just making do.  I mean, until Scrooge has his change of heart at the end of the book, they’re not going to have a lavish feast. They’re going to have a very small Christmas dinner because that’s what they can afford.

So it’s about the working people for the first time.

Host

Was Dickens telling a true story as to the way Christmas was being celebrated at the time, or was he creating a fictional Christmas with his telling of the story?

Cindy Sughrue

It was very much as Christmas was being celebrated at the time. But again, like most of what Dickens wrote, he drew a lot on his own personal experience, both from his own childhood and growing up and his his own family life as he married and had children himself. And he enjoyed a traditional Christmas. His parents, John  and Elizabeth Dickens, when they weren’t suffering, their own bouts of destitution, would provide very warm and festive Christmas entertainments from feasting to party games and mixing up bowls of punch.

So Dickens, you know, developed and inherited that tradition from his own family.

But what Dickens did in a Christmas Carol by writing about traditions as he liked to enjoy them – he really popularized Christmas that had been to some extent dying out. But this sense of bringing the family together to celebrate around a feast and to be pausing to think about those less fortunate and try to do something to make a difference. He he embedded that into the narrative of Christmas Carol. And that became immediately a sort of call to arms.

And, the very next year, you saw the sort of increase in charitable giving and a whole host of of new ways of supporting society were sort of built on the back of that.

And then, more thinking about Christmas traditions, you know, after after Christmas Carol and the wonderful prize Turkey that Scrooge sends the boy off to fetch on Christmas morning.

Audio Reenactment of “A Christmas Carol”

Scrooge : You know if they’ve sold the price tag that they had hanging there.

It’ll be hanging there now.

Scrooge : Well, you know

Ok

Scrooge : No, no, no. I’m serious. You go and buy it and bring it back here…

Cindy Sughrue

Turkey suddenly was the thing that everyone had to have. It was very common here to have goose or roast beef. But Turkey became the trendy thing to have on your Christmas table and all of the things that Dickens describes in such color and detail in a Christmas Carol, people started to emulate those things as well.

Host

I’ve pointed this out before stories like Irving’s sketchbook and a visit from Saint Nicholas. They combine what’s already recognizable within the holiday with things, elements that seem possible, or maybe they’re just a bit heightened from reality. So maybe tradition building is a mix of these two aspects, as Judith points out. Dickens was the first author to put the working class Christmas on display.

So you have a whole ignored segment of society taking center stage and people connected with that. Then, as Cindy explained, a Christmas Carol’s Christmas was a bit of an idealized version of the holiday with Charles Dickens elaborating on the traditions that already existed.

Dickens didn’t create Christmas, but he tapped into the holiday frenzy that was building in the 1840s, and he wrapped his story in just the right package for that time.

Actually, there are few elements of a Christmas Carol that sort of pull back the curtain on what Dickens was attempting to do here.

Judith Flanders

Two of the things that you have to sort of point out to people because they don’t notice, even if they’ve just finished reading the book. It’s called A Christmas Carol. There are no Christmas carols in it. It’s 1843, it’s really too early for Christmas’ Carol. He knows the word, but it’s not part of the festival yet. Equally there’s no Christmas tree, that’s going to come soon.

So what’s happening around this novel is as important as the novel itself. All of these customs are developing. And if you point out, say – that there is no tree in Christmas Carol, people say there must be. Of course there is. Because it’s inconceivable. But there aren’t – it isn’t there. So I think what’s really interesting is how these things are all happening at roughly the same time.

Host

And they are. Everything right here in the 1840s is building together. Even Dickens played into this.

We’ve hit on his altruistic reasons for writing A Christmas Carol, but those weren’t the only reasons he set it in and published it during Christmas.

Cindy Sughrue

There was also some other factors involved because there was the Christmas book market – and you know sort of lovely books at Christmas. That was becoming a thing.

There was something in the ether because 1843 the year that Christmas Carol was published was also the year that the first commercially available Christmas card was invented. So there was something there about starting to celebrate in the way that we very much would recognize today.

Host

Christmas cards and at Christmas Carol same year.

I want to point this out though, not because it’s a story of the rise of the Age of Christmas, but because it shows that society was still figuring Christmas out, testing the waters, trying to figure out what we wanted in our holiday.

The first series of Christmas cards were mostly flop.

First off, greeting cards weren’t a new thing. There was a long history of New Year’s cards and even Valentine’s Day cards dated back to at least 1820s. This was the first time, though, that Christmas was important enough that cards seemed necessary, well, at least necessary for Henry Cole, who just didn’t have time to write all the Christmas letters he needed to write that year.

So he and an artist friend copied the Valentine’s card formula and printed a thousand cards, which Cole used personally, but puts them up for sale as well. This was a bit premature. Christmas cards wouldn’t actually catch on for another 30 years or so, but their creation here underlines how prevalent Christmas is becoming. Just as we get our universal Christmas totem, the Christmas tree.

Bruce David Forbes

So Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the family bring us a Christmas tree. Bring us a Christmas celebration.

Host

Now, of course, the Christmas tree didn’t just appear out of thin air in 1848, and we’ll explore its history and really its origin myths in our episode, The History of the Christmas Tree, later in the season. But even though some people did have Christmas trees in their home beforehand, it was almost an oddity to see it. This point is really where they became a phenomenon, and it happened just about overnight.

Bruce David Forbes

Queen Victoria, 18 year old girl, becomes queen and everybody loves her. I mean, everybody was really into this. They just loved this young queen. And then she marries Prince Albert from Germany. Notice he’s from Germany where you didn’t have Puritans messing with things. And everybody loves this couple. And then they have children. And there are prints that are in newspapers that show the family all gathered together.

Judith Flanders

One of the Middle-Class magazines publishes a picture of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their children with a little table top Christmas tree.

Bruce David Forbes

That was published in 1848. It’s five years after Dickens’ Christmas Carol. It was all the rage. Then everybody wanted to have a Christmas tree because this was not a British tradition, but it was a German tradition.

Judith Flanders

And this is one of the things that suddenly, although there have been trees before, they have not been widespread. They mostly been in the German communities in Britain.

Bruce David Forbes

And then within two years, I think.

Judith Flanders

An American magazine, the same engraving, but they had de-monarchized it. So they’d taken off Queen Victoria’s Little Tiara and Prince Albert’s sash. They’d removed some of the presents, they’d made it less grand. So that you could vaguely believe it was just a normal household.

They also took off for reasons that are still totally evade me. They removed Prince Albert’s mustache.

Bruce David Forbes

And sets off the same rage over here.

Host

While the mustache situation remains under advisement. What this photo really highlights for the world is what society wanted to see in Christmas, and the tree takes center stage – visually.

Keep in mind, the tree pictured is a table top tree. When Christmas trees hit hop culture, they were small enough to fit nicely on top of the family table. And from the branches, parents would hang presents, moving the tree off the table, while transitioning to larger and larger trees, was mostly to do with an increase in the number and the size of presents being given.

Presents for shaping the holiday.

Later in the 1870s and 1980s may be the only thing more integral to the holiday than presents was Santa. But starting back here in the 1840s, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate Santa Claus from gift giving – as he becomes the most recognizable symbol within Christmas marketing.

Speaking of Santa as we round up the 1840s, Saint Nicholas remains a bit untamed.

The iconic Santa look is still being figured out. We have to move closer to the end of the century to get our first glimpse of the Santa that we now recognize. The unified vision of Santa as a jolly fat man. And we see them in the drawings of Thomas Nast in the 1860s and we see Santa Claus formally turned red as early as 1875.

As Christmas entered the late 1800s, the holiday we now celebrate was firmly rooted in the world. Almost all of the things you first think of when you hear Christmas were part of the popular culture. And at the same time – nearly every complaint that you will hear about Christmas this year is just an echo or even a word for word restatement of the complaints that were already prevalent by the end of the 1800s.

To me that says that Christmas – our Christmas – had arrived but not everyone agrees with me. Many people believe that it’s not until the 20th century with the advent of wrapping paper, mass communication, lawn decorations that our Christmases was really locked in.

The rest of the season we’re going to devote individual episodes to the ongoing expansion and growth of the Christmas holiday. Because even if you believe – as I do – that Christmas is pretty much set by the late 1800s, it’s really still the beginning of all the places our traditions will go before they arrive down our chimney this year.

One last note you’ll notice that throughout the series, religion and religious Christmas has been fairly absent.

Bruce David Forbes

Is so Christmas comes roaring back in the 1800s. But the churches did not do it. The churches didn’t say, “oh we don’t have enough of an emphasis on Christmas”. Christmas became culturally central and more and more people got involved, whether they were Christian or not. And that’s something that these cultural forces caused to happen.

Now, I’m sure no minister objected. You know, they were happy to see this happen. But what’s so interesting is Christmas comes roaring back. Not as part of a church campaign.

Host

If you’re interested specifically in the religious experience, the final episode of this season will be devoted just to the Christian Christmas, where we’ll explore it separate and unique rise over the last few hundred years.

But I want to go back to something I said at the very beginning of this story, that maybe the things we do to celebrate Christmas, the things that just happen – without even thinking, maybe they’re the reason for the holiday.

Having looked back and see where Christmas came from, maybe its roots are different. But step back for a second, and think about your Christmas celebrations. The thing you do every year, the things that are almost a compulsion, and ask yourself, why do you create Christmas this way?

Never lose sight of that.

Creating Christmas was produced this week by me, Bobby Christian and OversaturatedInc.  Special thanks to everyone who helped with today’s episode.

Bruce David Forbes and his book “Christmas : A Candid History”

Angela Platt. You’ll find more of her work on her blog : TheBeetonIdeal.co.uk

Judith Flanders and her book “Christmas : A Biography”

Cindy Sughrue and the Charles Dickens Museum of London – which is in Dickens actual house.

Again, special thanks to Pastor Matthew Kelly for his help earlier in the series.

And thanks to my wife Jade and my daughter Augustine for giving me time to put all this together.

You can find more episodes. Links and our fat jolly bibliography on our website Creating Christmas podcast.com. I hear every review the podcast gets an angel gets its wings.

We’re releasing new episodes every week leading up to Christmas. So until next time.

Stay jolly.

*Musical Outro*