Not everyone remembers the fictional Mrs Miniver, the creation of Jan Struther. She was the busy, common sense, omni-observant wife of Clem, an architect, and the mother of Vin, Judy and Toby. Their country home, ‘Starlings’ was perilously close to the south coast of England in wartime. When Mrs M. became incarnate in Greer Garson in the 1942 MGM film, she confronted a crash-landed enemy airman there. The Struthers columns in The Times were word pictures of everyday life - shopping in town, planning a vacation, hiring a cleaning woman.

The piece entitled “Three Stockings” begins with Toby, her youngest, waking her on Christmas morning with a “nobbly” Christmas stocking in hand. It was 6 a.m. A few minutes later Judy appeared. “There was nothing for it but to switch on a light, shut the window and admit that Christmas Day had begun”.

A decade before the half century, it was still the time when every such stocking had to have an orange or tangerine in its toe. Other seasonal trivia were superimposed. It was all, of course, only an apératif. The real banquet of presents awaited downstairs where a lighted tree was reflected in the still-black window panes. It would be some time before the sun, called “the day star” in poetic language, would shine upon the 25th day of December.

“This was one of the moments, thought Mrs Miniver, which paid off all the accumulation on the debit side of parenthood”. And then she heard from the activity of “cook” in the kitchen the “blessed chink” of the cups for early morning tea.

Clifton Fadiman said in The New Yorker that Mrs Miniver led one to look at quite insignificant things and then, lo!, to realise that they were not insignificant at all. Neither, I should add all these years later, is anything that happens among family members, friends and neighbours as we celebrate the next few days. There is a certain mystery “deep down” Christmastime. What we do and say then is strangely revelatory of who we really are.

The born-again Ebenezer Scrooge, after going to church on Christmas morning, “walked about the streets looking down into the kitchens of houses and up to windows. He had never dreamed that anything could give him such happiness”. Then he headed for his nephew Fred’s house to accept the invitation he had declined the previous day. From then on “he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge”.

A reporter-photographer should drop in some year on local families to record for people a century hence how many of us “keep Christmas” ten years into Century XXI. Would it not be interesting to see what folks in our town, maybe in your house, were doing a hundred years ago?

Scrooge and Mrs Miniver are imaginary persons. Real people have left us accounts of their Christmases. In 1847 Barclay Fox, a Quaker, noted the difference between the official celebration of an event and the unknown actual date. He wrote in his diary, “Whether this really was the day of Christ’s birth is very doubtful, yet I would not give up the annual feast”. Others have assured us that Palestinian shepherds are not out in the fields watching their flocks on a December night. And the earth was not hard as iron, water like a stone.

Fox concluded the entry with “I joined the Evanses at a good roast beef and plum pudding dinner”. That reminded me of a three-day party at which I was a guest one year at Ingoldisthorpe Manor in East Anglia.

On Christmas Eve we attended the Mass of Midnight in the parish church atop a nearby hill. On that clear night one could see ‘forever’ and hear the pealing of bells from miles around. A churchwarden told me that in 1788 the Revd Charles Wesley had stood there. On his return to London he wrote a carol that began “Hark how all the welkin rings / glory to the King of Kings”. The words were later altered to “Hark, the herald angels sing”.

East Dereham, Norfolk, is about 20 miles from Ingoldisthorpe, as the crow flies. The vicar there, the Revd Benjamin Armstrong, wrote in his diary for Christmas Day, 1866

[cf. the Faber Book of Diaries] that he had officiated at the wedding of a young parishioner named Mahershallalasbaz Tuck. He had that extraordinary name because at his baptism his parents had wished him to be called Uz. When the priest demurred the father insisted that if the child could not have the shortest proper name in the Bible, he would have the longest.

Clearly, there must have been some premonition of the clerical protest but there was also insufficient preliminary research. The symbolic name of the second son of the prophet Isaiah was Mahershalal hash-baz. Look it up sometime.

James Lackington, a London bibliophile who flourished about 200 years ago told of how he and his wife had only the equivalent of $20 to spend on their Christmas dinner.

On his way to the shop he passed a bookseller’s where he spent most of the money on a copy of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, 10,000 lines of inspired blank verse composed after the deaths of the author’s wife and several close friends. It has been compared with Milton’s Paradise Lost.

When he returned without the groceries he told his wife that while the food would have been gone the next day the book would be of enduring value. He said that after some discussion she agreed. Possibly she did.

For Christmas, 1946, Noel Coward’s diary reads, “A peaceful day spent in bed talking to people on the telephone. Sibyl [Thorndike, actress], Graham [Payne, his ‘companion’], Gladys [Calthorp, theatrical designer] and I had a delicious dinner, including caviar. Later, a party at Binkie’s” [Hugh Beaumont, manager producer].

Coward’s cheek and his chic, as one critic put it, his pose and his poise, included a supreme talent to entertain. In bed or on the telephone he could have entertained Scrooge’s Christmas ghosts anytime before dressing for dinner.