Over the course of his career, Charles Dickens wrote a series of Christmas-themed short stories that were serialized in popular magazines of the era. "The Holly Tree Inn," like many of these tales, reflects on the deeper meaning of the holiday, using the loneliness of the solitary traveler as a lens through which to examine society.

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While he was at supper, a parrot in the room began to talk, saying, 'Blood, blood Wipe up the blood ' In Dickens's The Holy-Tree, the narrator tells of his travels, and particularly of his stay at an inn in which he was once snowed up for a time. He meets some other travellers, and they naturally begin terrifying each other with tales of murderous criminals.