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 Once upon a time, before the coming of television changed our Christmas habits permanently, the greatest entertainment of the holiday season was the advent of the Christmas annual. Families would eagerly await publication of each year's volume, crammed with uplifting contributions from eminent authors and illustrators of the period, and gather together to read it aloud to each other. The idea persisted for quite a while in the "bumper books" for children that used to be published each Christmas, but we have little time these days for reading Christmas Stories aloud and the annual has become—almost a fairy story but still a great Gifts for Boys and Unique Gift Ideas For Girls.
The Christmas Annual
An unidentified elderly gentleman wrote in the Dublin University Magazine in 1847 that: Of all the many attractions which Christmas possesses in our old eyes . . . there are few to be compared to a quiet hour in our easy chair by the fireside, while, spread out upon the table before us lie, in all the gorgeous array of their crimson and gold binding, the Christmas Books.
The "gorgeous array of their crimson and gold binding" and the moralizing uplift of their contents aptly recall the contemporary efflorescence of the Christmas Stories.
A Christmas Annual was a special book, usually an anthology of poetry, prose, and pictures, issued in November or early December in time to be bought and presented as Unique Christmas Gifts. In Great Britain and the United States, in the five decades of the 1820s through the 1860s, the Christmas Annual was so popular a gift that thousands upon thousands of copies of nearly a hundred competing titles were issued, sold, wrapped, and given as presents. Many of these were bound in gold-stamped red leather or red boards; others, not so elaborately decorated, were still found wrapped in intense colors of gold and blue or turquoise and black.
The origins and predecessors of these annuals have been debated. One surmise is that they were extensions of the special Christmas numbers of magazines, especially children's magazines popular in the 18th century. The Juvenile Magazine, a monthly which last published in 1788, offered each December an issue with a special title page that was produced far more elegantly than usual. Similarly, The Youth's Magazine (1816) added to its December number extra engravings in the spirit of holiday festivities.
Another suggestion is that the Christmas annual is related to two familiar and popular English publications, the pocket diary and the almanac. Some pocket diaries included poems, stories, and essays devoted to such subjects as country dances or prominent persons in the news. The almanacs frequently included engravings meant to symbolize each month, and they also offered pages filled with information on such various subjects as royalty charts of Europe and lists of members of Parliament.
Despite such cloudy origins, however, it is clear that in November of 1822 Rudolf Acker-mann, the London publisher, offered for sale a book "expressly designed to serve as tokens of remembrance, friendship or affection, at that season of the year which ancient custom has particularly consecrated to the interchange of such memorials." Ackermann's Christmas Stocking Stuffers gift book was called Forget Me Not, A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1823, and with its publication he started a vogue that was quickly to sweep through Britain and into the United States.
Virtually all of the great names of early 19th-century English literature contributed at one time or another to Christmas Stories, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Tennyson, Mary Shelley, and Macaulay. In the United States the competition for contributions from the famous authors of the day was just as keen. Irving, Cooper, Whittier, Bryant, and Holmes each contributed to Christmas annuals. Younger writers, whose reputations were still to be made, also contributed. Nathaniel Hawthorne's first publication was in The Token of 1830, and Poe's "Manuscript Found in a Bottle" appears The Gift of l836.
For a vogue, Christmas Stories had a surprisingly long life: Forget Me Not did not cease publication until 25 issues had come out, Friendship's Offering ended after 21 years, and The Keepsake lasted 30 years, until 1857. In the United States the record holder is The Rose of Sharon, with 18 annual publications, and The Token is second with 15. Between 1846 and 1852 there were nearly 60 annuals published, but by 1860 the American literary Christmas gift was virtually extinct.
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