Christmas can be a time of overblown expectations. “Nothing like it used to be” we mutter as another expensive festive fling shrivels away like a limp balloon behind the decorations.

Then as sales bargains and sunshine brochures dance across the television screen, we close our eyes and seek consolation in an era when it really was a season of peace and goodwill, joyful family gatherings spiced with spontaneous storytelling around an open fire.

There’s a strong tendency to indulge more in a journey of imagination than to settle for a record of fact. Perhaps a quiet stroll along my local bookshelves can combine the two in a way that satisfies yearning for yesterday while recognising a few blessings of today.

My Christmas Eve saunter in search of uplifting voices starts way back in 1724 with Daniel Defoe heading this way on a Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Turkeys were already prominent on the festive menu. He reported on Christmas dinners that walked to London as turkeys and geese were driven to the capital on foot.

“A prodigious number are brought up from the farthest parts of Norfolk, even from the Fen country about Lynn, Downham, Wisbech and the Welney, as also from the east side of Norfolk and Suffolk, of whom it is very frequent now to meet drovers with a thousand, sometimes two thousand in a drove.”

A century later, when radical William Cobbett included Norfolk in his tours of the English countryside on horseback – his famous Rural Rides – his Christmas Eve chronicle for 1823 saluted “This county of excellent farmers and hearty, open and spirited men”.

Our clergy are exceptionally busy at this time of year, happily, two outstanding men of the cloth found time to light up pages of Norfolk history with plenty of Christmas entries in their famous diaries.

Parson James Woodforde looked after his Weston Longville flock from 1776 until his death on New Year’s Day in 1803. His first Christmas in Norfolk was marked by a shilling apiece and a good meal for the poor of the parish.

Chilly going on Christmas Day in 1874 for the Rev Benjamin Armstrong , Vicar of East Dereham: “The thermometer being 15 degrees below freezing point, many were kept away from church through the cold. Several sudden deaths owing to severity of the weather. The bell tolls every day in the fog.”

Henry Rider Haggard and daughter Lilias formed one of the most prolific family forces in Norfolk literary history. Henry had peered down King Solomon’s Mines and listened to She who must be obeyed before he became a gentleman farmer in his native county. He compiled A Farmers’ Year in 1898 as he worked land at Bedingham and Ditchingham.

His Christmas Day record included: “In the afternoon I went to hear some carol singing in the neighbouring church of Broome. Afterwards, a friend who lives there gave me some curious facts illustrating the decrease of population of the parish.

"It is his habit to make a present of meat at Christmas to every cottage inhabitant of Broome, and he informed me the difference in its cost owing to shrinkage of population between this year and last is something really remarkable."

The drift from the land sharply underlined crisis in the farming industry: There could be no hiding from grim realities. On Christmas Eve, 1939, as the country waited for unfettered dragons of war to breathe fire, Lilias Rider Haggard penned this poignant passage in her Norfolk Notebook after watching people on Norwich Market buying bunches of berried holly and little Christmas trees:

“Well,” said a stout and homely housewife tucking her awkward and prickly burden under her arm: “”There’s only one child at home this Christmas, and the Lord knows when I’ll get the others back again.. But I sez to the old man we’ll have the tree and all, and there’s not much to hang on it; we’ll have to do with hope for a trimmin’. They’ll like to think of us just a usual.”

Similar sentiments from Elizabeth Harland’s Diary of a Country Housewife. Her Christmas Day entry for 1950 reads: “In the endless struggle to keep alive, we have far too little time for things that really matter. But at this season, whatever our private preoccupations, however black and cloud-banked the international sky, we know a blessed relaxation. Work can wait, worries can be postponed, quarrels forgotten. Today belongs to peace, to joy and kindliness, to goodwill and giving”

I leave it to evergreen countryside champion Ronald Blythe, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, to complete this short but select band of inspirational scene-setters with a little gem from his 1997 volume Word from Wormingford :

“Christmas Eve. A small gift for the postman – thy have a rota – on whose endless kindnesses the logistics of this remote farmhouse turn. My towering holly hedge is snowily tipped with old man’s beard, but the lower boughs are a glowing mass of orange and dark green fruit and foliage. Blackbirds bustle in and out as I cut branches to hang over the pictures and fireplace.”

Now pull the curtains, stir the logs and settle in a favourite chair. Draw close and warm yourself on the hearth of remembrance. Listen carefully and you’ll hear the ghosts of Norfolk Christmas past.