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Christmas StoriesThe yearly holiday of Christmas has inspired many writers to create fictional Christmas stories that try to capture the "spirit" of Christmas in the form of a modern-day fairy tale. Over the years, a large number of fictional Christmas stories have been written, usually involving heart-touching tales that involve a Christmas miracle. Several of these stories have become very popular over the years, and have passed into popular culture and been accepted as part of the tradition of Christmas.
Perhaps the most popular is Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the tale of curmudgeonly miser Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge rejects compassion and philanthropy, and Christmas as a symbol of both, until he is visited by the "Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future", who show him the consequences of his ways. Through this tale and other Christmas-related stories, Dickens is sometimes credited with shaping the modern celebration of Christmas (tree, plum pudding, carols). If Dickens shaped the wider traditions of Christmas, Thomas Nast and Clement Moore provided us with the popular images of Santa Claus. Nast's 19th century cartoons gave Santa his familiar form, while Moore's poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas (popularly known as The Night Before Christmas) gave us the image of a rotund Santa and his sleigh landing on rooftops on Christmas Eve. Several popular Christmas songs have been added to the legend of Christmas, to the point where they are seen as inseparable from the holiday of Christmas itself. Examples include: A few true stories have become enduring Christmas tales themselves. The story of Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus is the most well-known of the true tales of Christmas. Also see: A collection of Christmas Stories, lyrics and poems
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia and from ShiningRise.com
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