“Christmas was an occasion of literally delirious joy. In the evening we hung up our stockings — or rather the biggest stockings we could borrow from the grown-ups — and before dawn we trooped in to open them while sitting on father’s and mother’s bed; and the bigger presents were arranged, those for each child on its own table, in the drawing-room, the doors to which were thrown open after breakfast. I never knew anyone else have what seemed to me such attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce them exactly for my own children.”

An Autobiography
1913