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Many hardcover popular authors are only five dollars.Check us out!  "Coffee pot's always on..."

Have a safe and happy holiday season.  Wishing you the peace and beauty the Christmas season brings. 

Victorian Parlour Cottonwood Mansion

 In The Victorian Christmas Book*, Antony & Peter Miall describe the tradition of a Christmas goose in the South of England and roast beef in the North.

In Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol (1843) the Crachit family dined on goose, "Its tenderness and flavor, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration."

"Bob Crachit's salary was fifteen shillings a week.  How could he afford a goose of such magnificence?  The answer lies in one of the great Victorian working-class institutions ~ The Goose Club.  Even the lowest paid worker could enjoy a goose at Christmas with his family by contributing to his local Goose Club a small part of his week's wages throughout the year.  Some Goose Clubs also raffled geese and bottles of wine or port...Bob Cratchit and many of his kind took their Christmas geese to the baker to be cooked, then returned home with the finished article to find the whole family waiting round the table with knives and forks at the ready.  Middle-class families, however, would expect to cook their own Christmas lunch."

~ *J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd., 1978.

~ Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870) English author

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