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.".