On Christmas Eve 1847 Dickens wrote to his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts, acknowledging a gift she had sent his wife, Catherine: “A thousand thanks for the notable turkey. I thought it was an infant sent her by mistake, when it was brought in. It looked so like a fine baby.”
Thank-you letters, the bane of many childhoods, have the marvellous function of showing future generations what people in the past rated as the top Christmas present. It tells us much about our social history that, overwhelmingly, the food gifts that had most economic and symbolic values were meat.
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