An unnamed contributor described another bright-spirited Christmas passed at a Presbyterian minister’s house in 1920. “The approach to Christmas was the usual crescendo, something like a rocket that bursts into multicolored lights as they climax and then falls into darkness,” the writer reflected. “The darkness in our case was the cold and sullen stream of school which surrounded us. Christmas was a luxuriant island, in which magical things were done in the glow of candles and odor of fir trees.”

“Christmas at the Ranch” in 1933 brought similar joy to the writer Hilda Rose. The isolated locale provided her and her family refuge during the Great Depression; “we are marooned, — shut away in the wilderness,” she wrote, “yet I would rather be here than out where I should have to see the misery and the hopeless eyes of the aged who had been living on carefully invested savings and have lost all.” A young man arrived on her doorstep on Christmas Day, looking for work after leaving behind his own large family and their farm in Canada; to Rose, he seemed “too good to be true—a treasure Santa Claus has brought.”

Katharine O. Wright passed another remote “Mountain Christmas” seven years later in Kentucky where, she wrote, “in row upon row of miners’ shacks, Christmas is reminiscent of many an old country.”

The British journalist Edmund Yates stated in a lecture “that all that the ‘Americans’ knew of Christmas they had learned from, or since the publication of Dickens’s Christmas stories,” wrote the literary critic Richard Grant White in his review of “Some Alleged Americanisms” in 1883. White dismissed this remembered claim as absurd: “The Maryland descendants and representatives of the old Roman Catholic colony of Lord Baltimore, and the New Orleans natives of the same faith, will learn with some surprise that they owed to the Protestant heretic Charles Dickens the birth of the feeling which made Christmas to them a great and solemn festival.” Americans, he argued, had been celebrating Christmas since long before Dickens reached their shore—and, as Wright witnessed decades later, would continue to do so in those old traditions for years to come.

Even so, another Atlantic contributor did laud Dickens’s portrayal of the holiday in A Christmas Carol. “There is not, in all literature,” asserted an 1868 review of the novel, “a book more thoroughly saturated with the spirit of its subject … and there is no book about Christmas that can be counted as its peer.”

The magazine was less kind to another Christmas classic: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the song. Cullen Murphy described it in 1990 as “an unwelcome piece of work not least because its tune, after one or two hearings, takes on the quality of an advertising jingle.” And, he asserted, “Worst still is the way it tells a story … with jaunty moral vacuity.” Murphy preferred the original book, which was “full and rich” and presented the reindeer’s heartwarming story with more character and depth.