Our Enduring Literary Feast

Throughout the 1600s and 1700s in early America, the stream of largely European settlers weaved a cultural patchwork across the land, in the process transplanting Old World culinary traditions and crossbreeding them with those of their neighbors, yielding something wholly New—and celebrations, such as Christmas, provided an ideal setting for combining the two.

In those heady days, Christmas bore little resemblance to our Victorian-inspired gathering of kith and kin, fellowship and food. Rather, lingering attachments to the absurd Roman Saturnalia—where, indeed, we gleaned our gift-giving tradition—took precedence as colonists hunted, pitched grand balls, feasted and celebrated their way into the chilly heart of winter.

Such antics had long drawn a disapproving eye from Puritan and Quaker settlers, and this disdain likewise went for the revelers’ highly spiced mincemeat pies, which, notes Cathy K. Kaufman in “The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink,” they dubbed “idolatrie in a crust.”

But by the 1800s, prevailing British sentiment was busy bridging the gap. During this period, a notable phenomenon of life imitating art took hold, ingraining Christmas-dinner traditions to date. As prominent writers of the day relayed Victorian Christmas experiences and observances in popular print, the public adopted the traditions as their own, spinning Christmas into the celebration we know today.

From 1819 to 1820, Washington Irving published a series of stories known as “The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.,” which included the popular “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Also among these was “The Christmas Dinner,” a tale of a grand Christmas feast complete with roasted turkey, pheasant pie and wassail bowl—a celebration, known as the Bracebridge Dinner, still annually replicated and recreated at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.

However, the concept of a Christmas dinner as a centerpiece for the holiday didn’t fully galvanize until Charles Dickens cast it into history—and the future—in “A Christmas Carol,” a novel that transformed stately Saturnalian feast into humble everyman’s meal, where roast goose and stuffing mingled with gravy, mashed potatoes and applesauce atop the Cratchit table, soon followed by a joyous dessert pudding “blazing in half a half-a-quartern of ignited brandy,” complete with ruddy apples and sunny oranges on the table, a communal jug of cheer, and chestnuts aromatically roasting and crackling on the fire.

In a deft communication of brotherhood and optimism, Dickens melded reverence with repast—a communal table offering whatever plenty the family could afford—giving rise to what can only be called the Christmas spirit, a time-traveling spirit that lingers throughout the holiday still.