Christmas Day
1819
Washington Irving wrote Christmas Day in 1819, but what he's really writing is a love letter to a vanishing world. The American author, spending time in England, crafts an idealized portrait of Christmas at Squire Bracebridge's manor house, where the entire day unfolds like a ritual of belonging. Morning begins with children's carols beneath the windows; afternoon brings church services in a chapel where the old customs still hold. But the real heart of the piece is the evening: a table groaning with old English fare, the wassail bowl passed around, servants and masters dancing together, and mummers performing in the great hall. Irving captures something precious here, the sense that these traditions are both alive and already disappearing. The prose has the quality of golden light slanting through old windows, warm and slightly melancholic. For readers who believe Christmas is, or should be, or once was, magical.
Editions
X-Ray
“I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.””
— Washington Irving
“All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely pre-ambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasent life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was - a woman.””
— Washington Irving
“Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.””
— Washington Irving
“There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.””
— Washington Irving
“and he would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the Devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was”
— Washington Irving
“...ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves.””
— Washington Irving
“And if unhappy in her love, her heart is like some fortress that has been captured, and sacked, and abandoned, and left desolate...””
— Washington Irving
“Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.””
— Washington Irving
“There is nothing like the silence and loneliness of night to bring dark shadows over the brightest mind.””
— Washington Irving
