In this sketch, I will try to give my readers some notion of the merriest and most revered holiday in England, of ‘Father Christmas’. There are special publications and special performances associated with this day that Dickens never said a word about anywhere. The performances, as the reader shall see, have now become a propaganda vehicle for economic doctrines.

In London, the first signs of the approach of Christmas may be seen initially in the poor quarters, and very early on at that: at the very beginning of September. This is the time when notices appear in pub windows announcing the formation of ‘Goose Clubs’. Apart from the plum pudding (Real, honest, substantial British plum pudding, as the English call it), the centrepiece of a Christmas dinner is a turkey or, failing that, a goose. Without it, Christmas is not Christmas. And in the poor districts, they begin to dream of a goose from the end of summer. The purpose of the ‘Goose Club’ is to provide people who have to get by on a day labourer's wage not just with a bird, but with many other things besides. ‘Club’ members pay a sixpence (a quarter) every week to the pub owner and, come Christmas, they receive a basket containing a goose, some tinned goods, a bottle of wine and two bottles of ‘Old Tom’ (vodka). Only in rare cases does the ‘Goose Club’ provide a plum pudding, because making it is a kind of sacrament for the wife of a labourer or clerk. They spend three whole weeks chopping the innumerable ingredients of the plum pudding, stirring, boiling, cooling, worrying, fretting, boiling again.