In yesterday’s advent calendar post, we shared a little fact related to an enduring Christmas carol. Today, another carol-related fact – though this time, involving one of the Victorian era’s leading poets. Christina Rossetti (1830-94), the prolific Victorian poet, is perhaps most famous for writing ‘Goblin Market’. Except that that isn’t her most famous poem. … Read more
Over the last few days we’ve been so preoccupied with Christmas food that we’ve lost sight of the magical side of Christmas, so today’s literary fact returns us to the rarefied heights of the classic Christmas carol. We’ll stick with the Victorians, though, since so much of our modern Christmas owes something to them. Carols … Read more
Yesterday we considered that gastronomic phenomenon that is the Christmas dinner, and revealed Dickens’s early piece of journalism about Christmas time, written some eight years before A Christmas Carol. Today, on to pudding – yes, today’s literature fact might be considered the dessert course in our feast of festive literary morsels. According to the Oxford English … Read more
Over the last few days, we’ve been pondering, in a series of posts, the literary history of Father Christmas and Santa Claus. Yesterday, we looked at how Santa’s working relationship with the soft drinks industry is more complicated than we might think. Today, we’re moving from the world of drink to the world of food … Read more
A little digression into the world of advertising for today’s Christmas-themed advent calendar fact. As we mentioned in yesterday’s post, there is a common idea that Coca-Cola ‘invented’ the modern Santa Claus, with the red and white robes being an invention of the soft drinks company – because these were, and are, the colours of … Read more