When "Knickerbocker's History of New York" was published, New Year's Day was New York's one and only holiday of the winter. In converting St. Nicholas into holiday fun, Irving had some help, apparently unsolicited, from John Pintard, a founder of the New-York Historical Society, who publicized an engraved picture of a rather dour St. Nicholas and sought to anoint the old bishop as the symbol of New York City.

Fast forward to England, 1820. Washington Irving had been living abroad since 1815, and it had taken him the better part of a decade to come up with another hit -- this time it was "The Sketch Book," in which his enduringly popular stories "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" both appear. But there are also several Christmas tales sandwiched between the American classics, and it is here that Irving succeeded in propelling the celebration of Christmas beyond the relatively modest Dutch model.

Irving had discovered disappearing holiday traditions among the English, and he thought they were too beautiful to lose. Without the festive spirit of Christmas, Irving mourned, an already uninspiring season would only become more bleak. "At other times we derive a great portion of our pleasures from the mere beauties of nature," he wrote in an essay titled "Christmas." "But in the depth of winter, when nature lies despoiled of every charm and wrapped in her shroud of sheeted snow, we turn for our gratifications to moral sources."

In "The Stagecoach," he described an unplanned trip to the estate of the Bracebridges, a family living in the quiet countryside. He writes about the bounty of the holiday table, the singing of carols and the generosity of the host toward the people of the neighborhood. In "Christmas Eve," Irving specifically mentions the curious practice of hanging mistletoe, so odd that it required a footnote to explain to his American readers: "The mistletoe is still hung up in farmhouses and kitchens at Christmas; and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked, the privilege ceases."

Meanwhile, back in the United States, there was still a marked ambivalence about Christmas. Episcopalians, Unitarians and evangelicals all had conflicting ideas as to what the holiday meant; the country as a whole could not determine whether it was to be considered sacred, secular or entirely blasphemous. Observation was irregular at best, though in mercantile Boston, for example, shops had been advertising the ritual exchange of Christmas gifts since at least 1808. What Irving understood was that Christmas needed a story.