Blind Horse Books

  TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY:  Merry Christmas!  May you never be too old to search the skies on Christmas Eve.  …and some Literary Christmas Trivia…. The first Christmas cards were sent in 1843, the same year as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was published. They were designed by London artist John Calcott Horsley. The penny post had been introduced three years earlier, making the process of sending letters and cards through the mail easy and affordable. Of the original 1,000 cards that were printed, only 12 are still in existence – nobody seems to have foreseen the longevity of the Christmas card-giving tradition, so few of them were preserved.   Between 1920 and 1942, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a series of letters to his children – letters from ‘Father Christmas’. The Father Christmas Letters were published posthumously in book form in 1976, and document in a light-hearted way some of Father Christmas’s adventures – mostly what he has been up to at t...

  TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: "A Visit from St. Nicholas".   "A Visit from St. Nicholas", more commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas" and "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" from its first line, is a poem first published anonymously in 1823 and later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who claimed authorship in 1837. Some commentators now believe the poem was written by Henry Livingston, Jr. By having St. Nicholas arrive the night before, Moore "deftly shifted the focus away from Christmas Day with its still-problematic religious associations." As a result, "New Yorkers embraced Moore's child-centered version of Christmas as if they had been doing it all their lives." The poem has been called "arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American" and is largely responsible for some of the conceptions of Santa Claus from the mid-nineteenth century to today. It has had a massive impact...

  TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY The Man Who Invented Christmas   "I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." Charles Dickens A bit about Dicken’s A Christmas Carol Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol  in six weeks during October and November 1843, and it appeared just in time for Christmas, on 19 December.  The book’s effect was immediate. Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian went straight out and bought himself a turkey after reading  A Christmas Carol . The book has been credited with popularizing the phrase ‘Merry Christmas’, a greeting which, prior to Dickens’s story, was not widely used. The term ‘Scrooge’ has entered the language – and the Oxford English Dictionary  – as shorthand for a tight-fisted and miserable person (although whenever we refer to a Christmas-hater as ‘a Scrooge’ we overlook the fact that Dickens’s character comes to embrace the holiday as a time of goodwill and good cheer at the end of t...