WHERE DID "MODERN" CHRISTMAS COME FROM?
The answer may surprise you.  I just thought it interesting:

A Christmas Carol” (1843) may be one of the most famous holiday tales extant, but it was his “A Christmas Dinner” (1835) that helped define the concept of “Christmas spirit” and set the stage for many of the traditions and foods that we enjoy to this day.  “He made it comfortable,” writes Dickens historian Peter Ackroyd in the foreword to the latest reissue of the book by Red Rock Press. “He made it cozy; he made it immune to the threatening world outside. It became the celebration of a small and close-knit community within a lighted room.” Dickens didn’t invent Christmas, but he couched it in a philosophy and centered it on an image that compelled people to see it and feel it as he did.  “There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas,” writes Dickens, when “petty jealousies and discords are forgotten” and father and son, brother and sister, “bury their past animosities in their present happiness.” In addition to placing holiday festivities squarely within the family circle, Dickens and his wife are also largely responsible for establishing the modern Christmas dinner menu.

Read the whole thing, it's interesting.  And as Christmas approaches, may you all have the most wonderful of holiday seasons...

"We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge and rule our
lives from within." -Earl Nightingale