Holidays

Thanksgiving through New Year, including Christmas, Twelfth Night and New Year’s, from every section.

Thanksgiving through Twelfth Night. Every story here is tied to the holidays by its own facts: a tale set on New Year's Eve, a ghost story first sold in a Christmas number, a riot that ran into Christmas morning.

Some are about the customs themselves, like Stir-up Sunday, New Year's Day calling in old New York and the claim that Santa's reindeer come from Odin. Each tile says what the tie is.

24 stories

Christmas: first printed in a Christmas number, Dec 10, 1866
Dickens’s Railway Ghost Story
On June 9, 1865, Dickens climbed out of a railway carriage left hanging off a broken bridge. The ghost story he wrote 18 months later, as a Christmas present for his readers, is his scariest, and he died five years to the day after the crash.
Christmas: the publisher held it back from Christmas 1885
Jekyll and Hyde Missed Christmas
Many copies of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde carry a cover printed "1885" with the year corrected to "1886" in pen. Longmans had planned it as a Christmas book, but the bookstalls were already full, so it came out in January.
Christmas: Andersen's Christmas-tree tale, Dec 21, 1844
The Christmas Tree That Ends in Fire
Four days before Christmas 1844, Andersen published a story about a Christmas tree. After one glorious Christmas Eve, it is dragged to the attic, mocked by rats, and chopped up to heat a brewing kettle. The same thin book introduced The Snow Queen.
New Year's Eve: the night the tale is set
The Match Girl’s New Year’s Eve
Hans Christian Andersen set The Little Match Girl on New Year's Eve, and she is found frozen on New Year's morning. He wrote it in November 1845 to go with a picture that had already been drawn and printed for something else.
Christmas: Stir-up Sunday, the Sunday before Advent
Where Stir-up Sunday Came From
British families stir the Christmas pudding on "Stir-up Sunday," supposedly by medieval church decree. The name comes from a prayer, the pudding comes from a schoolboy parody, and the decree has never turned up, even with a $1,000 reward offered for it.
Thanksgiving: when New York's kids begged in costume
New York’s Thanksgiving Maskers
More than a century ago, New York children put on masks and their parents' old clothes and went door to door asking for pennies. They did it on Thanksgiving Day, and in the 1930s the city's schools chief and its charities worked to end the custom.
New Year's Day: New York's great calling day
New York’s 100-Call New Year
For most of the 1800s, New Year's Day in New York meant gentlemen racing from parlor to parlor making 100 or more social calls in twelve hours, while the women of the house stayed home with oysters, cake and hot punch, counting the cards.
Twelfth Night: Baddeley's cake, every Jan 6 since 1795
An Actor’s Twelfth Night Cake
In 1794 a comic actor named Robert Baddeley left money in his will for a Twelfth Night cake for the actors of Drury Lane. The London Museum says Drury Lane actors are still greeted with the cake on Twelfth Night.
Thanksgiving: a song about Thanksgiving Day
The Radical Behind “Over the River”
It’s a Thanksgiving song about grandfather’s house. Its author had lost her magazine over abolition.
Christmas: A Christmas Carol, published Dec 19, 1843
The Pamphlet Dickens Never Wrote
In 1843 Charles Dickens planned to write a political pamphlet about child labour. He decided a ghost story would hit "twenty thousand times" harder.
Christmas: the riot ran from Christmas Eve into Christmas morning, 1826
The West Point Eggnog Riot
Two hundred years ago this Christmas, a smuggled batch of eggnog turned West Point's North Barracks into a war zone, and the future president of the Confederacy was in the middle of it.
New Year's Eve: the first ball drop, Dec 31, 1907
The First Times Square Ball Drop
The Times Square ball started as a newspaper's fire-safety workaround, and it borrowed its design from a navy clock: since the 1840s, American harbors had used dropping balls to tell ships the exact time at noon.
Christmas: the Strand's Christmas Number, 1920
Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies
For the Strand Magazine's 1920 Christmas Number, the creator of Sherlock Holmes announced that two girls in Yorkshire had photographed fairies. He called it "an epoch-making event." The fairies were paper cut-outs held up with hatpins.
Christmas: answering children's letters to Santa
The Santa Claus Man
The man who first got New York's Santa letters answered at scale was a young publicist who signed himself as Santa's helper, raised money from 76,000 donors and movie stars, promised a marble "Santa Claus Building" that never rose, and was finally pushed out by the city's charity watchdog.
Christmas week: the hoax ran Dec 28, 1917
Mencken’s Bathtub Hoax
In the dead week after Christmas 1917, H. L. Mencken invented the history of the American bathtub as a joke, confessed nine years later, and still could not stop it: a sitting President repeated it in 1952.
Christmas: where Santa's reindeer came from
Is Santa Really Odin?
Santa's sleigh team went from one reindeer to eight in two years, 1821 to 1823, in two New York publications. Odin's eight-legged horse is 600 years older and an ocean away, and no document connects the two.
Christmas: the mistletoe kiss and its claimed Norse origin
The Mistletoe Kiss Myth
The usual Christmas explainer says the mistletoe kiss comes from a Norse myth in which the goddess Frigg brings her son back to life and promises a kiss to anyone under the plant. In the 13th-century Icelandic account, the mistletoe is the dart that kills Baldr, and he stays dead.
New Year's Day: the Green Knight crashes the New Year feast
The New Year Poem With No Title
England's great Christmas-to-New-Year poem has no title in its only manuscript. Catalogers in 1696 and 1802 lumped it in with a religious dream poem, and the name we use today comes from Frederic Madden, who printed it "for the first time" in 1839.
Christmas: Bly spent Christmas Day 1889 in Canton
Nellie Bly’s Race Around the World
On Nov 14, 1889, Nellie Bly set out to beat a fictional hero's 80 days. Jules Verne himself toasted her and doubted she would make it. She didn't learn until Hong Kong that a second woman had left New York the same day, heading the other way.
Christmas: Holmes debuted in Beeton's Christmas Annual, 1887
Sherlock Holmes, Sold for £25
The first Sherlock Holmes story was rejected or ignored by several publishers. The one that took it offered £25 for the copyright, made it a Christmas annual, and, by Doyle's account, never paid him another penny.
Christmas: new Alice editions for Christmas 1907
Alice’s Recalled First Edition
The first printing of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was pulled because the illustrator hated how his pictures came out. Forty-two years later the UK copyright ran out, and by that Christmas at least seven new illustrated versions were in the shops.
New Year's Eve: the film opened in New York Dec 31, 1931
Jekyll and Hyde: 1931 or 1932?
Fredric March's Oscar-winning Jekyll opened on New Year's Eve 1931, which puts it on every "class of 1931" list. Its copyright record says 1932, and the renewal was filed by the parent company of the studio that later bought the film and shelved it.
New Year's Day: why old works go free every Jan 1
The Long Copyright Freeze
On Sept 19, 1962, Congress passed a two-sentence resolution that kept old copyrights from expiring "until December 31, 1965." It then renewed that stopgap eight more times, once on New Year's Eve 1974. In 1998 it added 20 years on top. The upshot: Jan 1, 2027 is only the ninth US Public Domain Day with a new crop of published works since 1998.
Christmas: the penny piracy of A Christmas Carol, Jan 1844
Dickens and the Carol Pirates
On 6 January 1844, number 16 of Parley's Illuminated Library published a penny version of A Christmas Carol. Dickens got an injunction in Chancery. He still paid the costs.

Commons Cut · free every week

Get stories like this in your inbox, free.

The strange stories behind familiar classics, in a free weekly newsletter, on the website, and in short videos. Free every Tuesday. Issue No. 2 is out now: Was trick-or-treating born on Thanksgiving?

Free when you subscribe: the Public Domain Day 2027 cheat sheet (PDF).

Want the full, true story behind each work? See The Director’s Cut, our paid edition.

from Half-In Productions