In 1903, the early Dickens scholar F.G. Kitton (no relation to Luna) published an essay titled “The Man Who ‘Invented’ Christmas”. The thesis was that Charles Dickens not only wrote a timeless tale with A Christmas Carol but managed to reinvent the entire holiday. That may be a bit of stretch. Per David Parker in Christmas and Charles Dickens, Kitton may have been making a bit of a joke, and no less an authority than the The Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz suggests that you will be very smart indeed to dispute the idea.

As is usually the case, the real story is more complicated. As Adam Lusher wrote in the Independent in 2018,

It is true that industrialisation meant fewer people were exposed to the rural squirearchy’s habit of opening their doors to the lower orders and staging grand Christmas celebrations – of the kind seen at Crewe Hall in Cheshire, where Dickens’ grandfather had been the butler, or in the pages of A Christmas Carol, where The Ghost of Christmas Past reminds Scrooge of how much he had enjoyed the dances organised by old Fezziwig.

But in 1843, outside the ranks of the aristocracy and aspirant upper middle-class imitators, Christmas was alive and well. Previous attempts to kill it had, after all, foundered on the stubborn resistance of “Merrie England”.

…

What Dickens did do, though, was give Christmas one heck of a PR push. “He was showing what was going on,” says Ms Hawksley, “And making it even more so. After A Christmas Carol, people become obsessed with celebrating Christmas.

“Before, there were people who were, like Scrooge’s nephew, doing their own family Christmases, but after, suddenly everyone is thinking: ‘We should be doing that. Why haven’t we got people coming round and playing blind man’s buff?’

“It all starts to get much bigger.”

Invention remains a key word, though: Christmas is not my holiday, nor is it Marlene’s, but it can be and is celebrated as a cultural holiday by many who have no connection to Christianity whatsoever. (Or not celebrated at all, of course.)

Speaking of invention and Christmas, let’s consider this fearsome feline:

This is the Jólakötturinn, the Yule Cat of Iceland, a monster who traditionally will eat you if you don’t manage to get new clothes by Christmas Eve. Or maybe not:

Árni Björnsson is one of the best known folklorists living in Iceland today. His meticulous research into the Icelandic ritual calendar, including the origins of traditions connected with festivities and celebrations, was first published in two best-selling books in 1980 and 1981. His 800 page opus magnum, Saga daganna (“The History of Days”), was published in 2000. It is a vital resource for folklorists in Iceland. Like many folklorists of his generation, Björnsson has been a proponent of healthy skepticism when confronting folktales, folk beliefs and supposedly old customs. In a famous article in Skírnir published in 1996 he suggested that many elements of folk belief were simply folk fiction, stories meant to entertain rather than expressions of genuine belief.

In the case of the Yule cat, Björnsson notes the limited 19th century source material, which is almost entirely based on a paragraph in Jón Árnason’s collection of folktales. There it is called an “evil beast” (óvættur) that would either eat those who got no new clothes for Christmas, or steal their “Christmas bit” (jólarefur; an extra portion of food given to the residents of the farm). In a footnote Árnason mentions the figure of speech “to dress the cat” or “dress the Yule cat” which happened to those who didn’t get new clothes for Christmas. This footnote is based on one of his major sources, Jón Norðmann, while it is unclear where he gets the idea of the “evil beast”. The meaning may be simply that cats never change clothes. Sometimes the unfortunate ones were said to “do the cat” or be “taken by the cat” which leads Björnsson to conclude that the Yule cat was a figure of speech that Árnason may have misinterpreted as a monster. Björnsson was for many years the head of the folklife collection of the National University of Iceland and he used the questionnaires extensively in the History of Days. Many respondents in the collection were aware of this figure of speech, but were unsure as to its origin.

Watch out! Both for the Jólakötturinn and how words and stories can shift in the telling!

From Marlene and me and Hecate, George, Luna, and Tuna, may you have peace and plenty this Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Solstice – or simply as easy a time of it as possible if you are working today.

Oh, and if you’re a librarian in possession of of the run of V. C. magazine (London, 1903-1904), could you digitize Kitton’s essay? That would be a lovely Christmas present! It turns out that there are a lot of references to the notion that Kitton stated that Dickens invented Christmas, but no online copies of his essay that I could find.