Brighten the holiday season with five classic tales from the master of Christmastime fiction. Charles Dickens's most famous holiday story is the 1843 publication  A Christmas Carol , but he was a prolific writer in the yuletide genre and a great contributor to many now-prevalent traditions of the holiday itself. In the year following the release of  A Christmas Carol , Dickens released  The Chimes: A Christmas Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In . This story combined his enduring sympathy for the poor with the notion that we must always strive to live in nobler ways. In 1845 came  The Cricket on the Hearth , a novella that, in its time, surpassed even  A Christmas Carol  in popularity for stage productions. The years 1846 and 1848 respectively brought  The Battle of Life  and  The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain . Given this wealth of Christmas-themed works, it is no wonder that Dickens is sometimes referred to as “the man who invented Christmas.” Born on February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens is one of the most popular literary authors of all time. After a very tumultuous childhood, Dickens finally succeeded in getting his first story in a London periodical. As the number of his published works increased, so did his fame. Although he died in 1870, Dickens works are some of the most famous written works in the English language.