Christmas Idols
Feast of St. John of the Cross
Celebrating the People Who Invented Modern Christmas
About Christmas Idols
Christmas Idols celebrates the literary giants who transformed Christmas from a boisterous public celebration into an intimate, family-centered holiday. Christmas wasn’t always cozy. For centuries it was loud, drunken, and frequently banned, denounced as a rowdy street festival full of misrule and excess. It took a trio of writers to reimagine the holiday as something closer to the hearth. Something generous and steeped in sentiment. Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore, and Charles Dickens together transformed Christmas into a celebration of home and moral renewal. Today, we honor their legacy with a simple table and a toast to the many writers—the original trio and their spiritual successors—who helped root Christmas in the love of family.
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Read a chapter or passage from Washington Irving’s Old Christmas aloud for friends or family.
(B) Recommended
Gather the family around the table for a simple, heartfelt dinner. Afterward, read a short story or excerpt from Old Christmas, enjoying the warmth of the season together.
(C) High effort
Host a Victorian-themed Christmas dinner in honor of Dickens, Irving, and Moore. Decorate the table with greenery and serve traditional fare such as roast goose or turkey. End with a storytelling segment, each guest reading a passage from one of these authors.
Inspiration
Dickens and Moore loom large in the Christmas canon. So large, in fact, that Dickens gets his own day in this Almanac. But today we light a small, festive candle for the other Christmas luminaries, starting with Washington Irving. Irving is the underrated architect of Christmas sentimentality. In his Old Christmas sketches (1819–1820), he offered up nostalgic scenes of crackling hearths, wassail bowls, and country squires welcoming travelers. These images helped re-domesticate the holiday after centuries of rowdy public revelry. He made Christmas feel warm and inward-facing. And crucially, he helped set the tone for Dickens himself, who openly admired Irving’s work.
Clement Clarke Moore followed in 1823 with A Visit from St. Nicholas, a poem that cast St. Nick as a jolly, rotund fellow with a sleigh and eight reindeer, delivering presents with brisk efficiency and shouting “Merry Christmas to all!” Dickens arrived in 1843 with A Christmas Carol, combining Irving’s coziness with Moore’s magic while adding a moral backbone of generosity and social conscience. Together, these three laid the foundation for what we now recognize as the modern Christmas: equal parts twinkle and ghost story. But they weren’t alone. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women helped make Christmas a symbol of selflessness and sisterly devotion. O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi stripped gift-giving down to its tender core. L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus gave us an origin story for Moore’s Santa, complete with immortality, woodland creatures, and Christmas councils. The list of writers who have shaped Christmas goes on and grows each year. Each deserves a toast, but none more so than the original triumvirate.
Adornments
Watch
Little Women (2019)
Greta Gerwig’s adaptation opens with a heartfelt Christmas morning that highlights themes of generosity, creativity, and sisterly devotion. The warm domestic scenes are deeply aligned with the values celebrated by Dickens and Irving.
Joyeux Noël (2005)
A moving dramatization of the 1914 Christmas Truce, when soldiers from opposing sides in World War I laid down their weapons to sing carols, share food, and celebrate the holiday together. A striking account of how the spirit of Christmas can emerge even in the bleakest settings.
Listen
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (Traditional)
A carol deeply associated with Dickensian London, famously sung by carolers in A Christmas Carol.
I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In (Traditional)
A bright, lilting English carol that gained popularity in the early 19th century and was widely sung throughout the Victorian period.
Read
Old Christmas by Washington Irving
A warm-hearted, nostalgic portrait of an English country Christmas, as seen through the eyes of a curious American visitor. Washington Irving follows his host from snowy roads to a roaring hearth, observing festive games, mistletoe customs, and twelfth-night revelry.
Victorian Christmas by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley
A guide to Christmas as celebrated in the Victorian era. Written by a descendant of Charles Dickens, it explores the origins of caroling, crackers, puddings, decorated trees, and more.