Merry Christmas to all our readers! Over the last 24 days we’ve posted a daily Christmas fact about some aspect of literature, and now we’re gathering together all of these Christmas literary facts into one bumper blog post. So, if you missed some or all of our advent calendar posts, you can now read them all in this collected ‘omnibus’ post. We hope you enjoy them. Ho ho ho!
1. 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. 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. Robins on Christmas cards are, in fact, a little Victorian joke: Victorian
postmen were nicknamed robins because of their red…
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