Christmas Cake

Christmas is a favourite time of year in literature, with its appearance serving many different narrative functions.  It provides an occasion for characters to be reunited - as in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) where Tom Tulliver returns from school to his family.  Christmas can also provide drama, such as the Christmas meal in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1861), during which the soldiers hunting the escaped prisoners - including Magwitch, whom the protagonist Pip has supplied with his sister's Christmas pork pie - arrive and disrupt proceedings.  In Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published 18 years earlier in 1843 Christmas provides the motivation and opportunity for personal change, with the miserly Scrooge learning to love and give after he is visited by an array of ghosts.