Authors such as Alcott and Charles Dickens promoted Christmas at a time when many people, still influenced by the asceticism of their Puritan forebears, saw the holiday as “doctrinally suspect.” To adapt Jo’s remark, Christmas would not have become Christmas without “Little Women,” “A Christmas Carol” and the material that filled the pages of year-end periodicals. During this period, he writes, “books were at the center of Christmas.” They served as popular presents, but more significantly their substance reshaped the national imagination. The scene illustrates a claim of Thomas Ruys Smith’s in “Christmas Past,” his selection of “seasonal stories” from the 19th century. Jo’s complaint is a famous first line in American literature-and in the second chapter, when the March sisters wake up on Christmas morning, they discover that their mother has left them gifts of books. Weird Christmas Podcast January 9th Christmas Past, American Xmas Literary History with Thomas Ruys Smith. These have the subject Christmas-Literary. ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbles 15-year-old Jo March in “Little Women,” the 1868 novel by Louisa May Alcott. Christmas past : an anthology of seasonal stories from nineteenth-century America - Smith, Thomas Ruys.
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