A Christmas Dinner
A Story by Charles Dickens

Foreword by Peter Ackroyd
Recipes by Alice Ross
Illustrations by Sharon Stein

Would that Christmas lasted a whole year (as it ought)...
"The Christmas family-party that we mean is an annual gathering of all the accessible members of the family, young or old, rich or poor; and all the children look forward to it, for two months beforehand, in a fever of anticipation...grandpapa always will toddle down, all the way to Newgate market, to buy the turkey, which he engages a porter to bring home behind him in triumph..."

These snippets are from the first Christmas sketch penned by a newspaper man named Charles Dickens. He was 22 in December of 1835 when he composed this scenario for an ideal Yuletide gathering. Dickens, who may have invented the modern notion of Christmas, had lively ideas about what a family Christmas should be—down to how preparations should be shared, what gifts might be distributed, what kind of mischief mistletoe could prompt, how less-esteemed relations were to be embraced and what dainties might be served on Christmas Eve and what should be part of a Christmas Day feast.

No one is better able to introduce A Christmas Dinner than Peter Ackroyd, Dickens’ most important living biographer who is also a prize-winning novelist, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the chief literary critic of The Times of London.

This book is also enriched by the Christmas menus and recipes (some from the Dickens household) adapted for contemporary cooks by distinguished culinary historian Alice Ross, who writes the "Hearth to Hearth" column in The Journal of Antiques and Collectibles.

Less well-known is Sharon Stein, a young Pennsylvania artist whose original and historically-accurate paintings enhance this work.