Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is from an 1820 book named The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  The Sketchbook is a collection of Irving’s stories put together as a marketing strategy meant to undermine the pirating and unauthorized publishing of his individually released stories in England.  It also contains a group of stories reporting on a fictionalized Christmas vacation spent in a remote English manor called Bracebridge Hall.  Bracebridge Hall is the just the kind of place where ancient Christmas customs (fast-disappearing in a modernizing world) might be expected to survive, or even flourish under the guiding hand of an aged lord of the manor and the eager participation of the younger generations (I count two younger generations and various age-cohorts of children populating the Christmas festivities).