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There are hundreds of Christmas stories, that have recorded traditions and started them. In preparation for Christmas, we thought we'd share a few literary Christmas facts about the stories we love and the people who wrote them:
Christina Rossetti wrote the words to the Christmas carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter.’
T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Journey of the Magi’ was originally commissioned to be included in a Christmas card.
In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Tiny Tim was originally going to be called ‘Little Fred.’
‘Father Christmas’ first appears in a play by Ben Jonson, Christmas his Masque (1616).
The Grinch didn’t first appear in Dr Seuss’s classic Christmas story, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957) but first appeared in print two years earlier, in a 1955 poem, ‘The Hoobub and the Grinch'.
Harper Lee’s friend gave her a year’s wages for Christmas, on condition that she give up work and write. She wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.
Dickens’s first published piece of writing was a short ‘sketch’ – published when he was in his early twenties – describing the perfect Christmas dinner.
Between 1920 and 1942, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a series of letters to his children from ‘Father Christmas.’
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known use of the phrase ‘Christmas pudding’ is in Anthony Trollope’s 1858 Barsetshire novel Doctor Thorne.
Michael Bond bought ‘Paddington Bear’ in 1956. He felt sad for the teddy bear as it was the only toy left on the shop’s shelves on Christmas Eve.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
