Keeping Christmas well - Day 1

“….and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!”

I love this closing to Dicken's Christmas Carol. We attend the play almost every year at our local Hale Theater, and it is always enjoyable to be reminded that generosity and service are some of the reasons for the holiday season.
Sometimes for me it can feel like I have one foot in the holy – the true reasons and meaning of this season, and the other foot deeply and busily emerged in the preparations, decorations, baking, shopping, and wrapping. What I want to try to do this year is not see these as separate things but pull all the seemingly busy work into the holy – prepare with joy; decorate with gladness; bake and shop with the true intention of making my friends and family happy; wrap and prepare with a peaceful heart intent on preparing myself too to celebrate the birth of Christ.

The ghost of Christmas past will visit my blog and share some examples of keeping Christmas well throughout the month.

This interesting read about how A Christmas Carol influenced Christmas traditions is from Wiki:

Legacy

Whilst the phrase 'Merry Christmas' was popularized following the appearance of the story,^[48] and the name 'Scrooge' and exclamation 'Bah! Humbug!' have entered the English language,^[49] Ruth Glancy argues the book's singular achievement is the powerful influence it has exerted upon its readers. In the spring of 1844, The Gentleman's Magazine attributed a sudden burst of charitable giving in Britain to Dickens' novella; in 1874, Robert Louis Stevenson waxed enthusiastic after reading Dickens' Christmas books and vowed to give generously; and Thomas Carlyle expressed a generous hospitality by staging two Christmas dinners after reading the book.^[50] In America, a Mr. Fairbanks attended a reading on Christmas Eve in Boston, Massachusetts in 1867, and was so moved he closed his factory on Christmas Day and sent every employee a turkey.^[27] In the early years of the 20th century, the Queen of Norway sent gifts to London's crippled children signed "With Tiny Tim's Love"; Sir Squire Bancroft raised £20,000 for the poor by reading the tale aloud publicly; and Captain Corbett-Smith read the tale to the troops in the trenches of World War I.^[51]
According to historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol. Hutton argues that Dickens sought to construct Christmas as a family-centered festival of generosity, in contrast to the community-based and church-centered observations, the observance of which had dwindled during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.^[52] In superimposing his secular vision of the holiday, Dickens influenced many aspects of Christmas that are celebrated today in Western culture, such as family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games, and a festive generosity of spirit.^[53]