Christmas: Christmas Dinner in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

In the mid-nineteenth century, cultural changes in America led to a fundamental shift in the nature of Christmas observances, from bawdy and rowdy public frolics to sentimental Victorian domesticity. Popular literature such as The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819) by Washington Irving and the 1823 poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” piqued an antiquarian interest in Christmas. Christmas demanded a dinner with family that was special but within the economic reach of most Americans. Because no single cultural Christmas tradition monopolized American foodways, the unifying model for the American Christmas dinner of the middle to late nineteenth century was supplied by Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol (1843).