Ever wonder why the bigest promoters of the so called "Christian" holiday are the Jews?

Nope....But then again I am not Anti-Semitic.

[QUOTE=anthonyC]
[QUOTE=guillermone]
Ever wonder why the bigest promoters of the so called "Christian" holiday are the Jews?
[/QUOTE]


Nope....But then again I am not Anti-Semitic.
[/QUOTE]


Dickens "the man who invented Christmas"
Philip V. Allingham, Contributing Editor, The Victorian Web; Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario
[Home —> Authors —> Charles Dickens —> Works —> The Christmas Books]



Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit,which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance! — Charles Dickens, "What Christmas Is as We Grow Older," 1851
s we look back from our perspective of a century-and-a-half, Charles John Huffam Dickens does indeed seem to be what London's Sunday Telegraph for 18 December 1988 proclaimed him, "The Man Who Invented Christmas." Certainly, he seems to have convinced his younger contemporaries that it was he rather than Benjamin Disraeli's Young England Movement or Oxford's Puseyites that had rediscovered the great Christian festival that — because of the massive inmigration to the cities that accompanied the industrial revolution — had been on the wane in Great Britain since the latter part of the eighteenth century. Paul Davis in The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (1990) retells the anecdote first told of Dickens by Theodore Watts-Dunton in 1870. As he was walking down Drury Lane near Covent Garden Market on June 9th that year, Dunton overheard a Cockney barrow-girl's reaction to the news of the great novelist's death: "Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?" The fact is that, for those of us of British origin, Dickens more than anybody else revived the Christmas traditions which had nearly died out.

Although Dickens celebrated the festival of Christ's birth in numerous works, it is A Christmas Carol, published on 19 December 1843, that has preserved the Christmas customs of olde England and fixed our image of the holiday season as one of wind, ice, and snow without, and smoking bishop, piping hot turkey, and family cheer within. Coming from a family large but not-too-well-off, Charles Dickens presents again and again his idealised memory of a Christmas associated with the gathering of the family which "bound together all our home enjoyments, affections and hopes" in games such as Snap Dragon and Blind Man's Buff, both of which his model lower-middle-class father, Bob Cratchit, runs home to play on Christmas Eve.

Dickens's most recent biographer, Peter Ackroyd, notes that our image of a snowy Victorian Christmas is a mere accident of history. Although eastern England has a winter climate somewhat more raw than that of Vancouver, British Columbia, Portland, Oregon, or Seattle, Washington, it is by no means as chilly and bleak as Dickens depicts it. "In view of the fact that Dickens can be said to have almost singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas, it is interesting to note that in fact during the first eight years of his life there was a white Christmas every year; so sometimes does reality actually exist before the idealised image" (p. 34). Ackroyd points out that Dickens' boyhood Christmases were probably inspired by his father, John Dickens, who until his nineteenth year would have celebrated the season with his parents, butler and maid at the opulent Crewe Hall, where he would have participated with servants and tenants in conjurings, country dances such as Sir Roger de Coverley (footed by Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig among their apprentices and employees in Scrooge's youth), forfeits, Blind Man's Bluff, and card games such as Speculation. Owing to the fear of drinking contaminated water, various kinds of gin punch such as Purl (beer heated to near-boiling, then flavoured with gin, sugar, and ginger) and Bishop (heated red wine, oranges, sugar, and spices) were consumed by revellers of all ages, again as in the festivities in the Cratchit household.

This all sounds very much like the traditional Victorian Christmas that the British Post Office recalled in a series of five postage stamps marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of A Christmas Carol. As the commemorative stamp packet points out, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the old ceremonies and festivities had become obsolete because, as the poet Robert Southey remarked in 1807, "In large towns the population is continually shifting; a new settler neither continues the customs of his own province in a place where they would be strange, nor adopts those which he finds, because they are strange to him, and thus all local differences are wearing out." Both Sir Walter Scott in 1808 and Washington Irving in 1820 had likewise lamented the passing of the old 'country' Christmas of twelve days of jollity and misrule. By the beginning of the Railway Age in the 1840s many people approaching middle age (as Dickens then was) began to look back nostalgically to the good, old days of coaches and hospitable inns, manorial feasts, and blazing yule-logs. However, Britain was also in need of new Christmas traditions as, for the first time in its history, it had become a nation of urbanites who could hardly afford to take off the twelve days that had constituted the holiday season for their rustic forebears. Enter Charles Dickens... and others.

Read on.......


http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/xmas/pva63.html

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Neither am I, but what does that have to do with the price of beans?