If you like Christmas tradition, thank Dickens.

If you like Christmas dinner, thank the South.

If you like biscuits, thank heavens you don’t have to make them the old way.

However, if you do want to serve old-time beaten biscuits this holiday season, get out the ax now and find yourself a solid oak tree. You will need to fell the tree and plane the stump before you prepare the Christmas turkey.

The invention of modern Christmas traditions began with Charles Dickens, who wrote a new Christmas story every year. The most famous of them conjures up family, home and occasion, which Clemson University historian Alan Grubb notes are familiar elements of our holidays today. The enlightened Scrooge of “A Christmas Carol” responds to his newfound generosity by buying food and joining his nephew’s family for Christmas dinner.

If a nod from Dickens inspired Americans to serve a big holiday dinner, it was the South that taught this country what to eat and how to serve it, according to Grubb, who uses old cookbooks to research history.

“Even in Colonial times, the South had a reputation for good food and elaborate tables,” according to Grubb, who says that old cookbooks are more than just recipes. They were guidebooks with advice on etiquette, child rearing, medicine, household hints and marriage. “The South was an agrarian society, and Christmas also was hog-killing time, so it was a time of plenty.”

Southern cooking was so revered that books on the subject were available all over the country. Some of them were written by non-southerners, but all of them were written by women and for women.

The kitchen was the domain of the woman, often the family matriarch, and a holiday was her big moment. The Southern reputation for excellent food was always good for the region’s image, even in times when the South otherwise suffered from severe negative stereotyping, and it was something women took seriously.

A culture of creating and serving good food rubbed off on everyone, even a woman who may not have been predisposed to culinary excellence. It wasn’t something she always did alone, though. Even families of modest wealth often had cooks or servants, if not slaves in the antebellum days. There were enough hands to create elaborate meals that would make even today’s foodies jealous.

One special attraction was beaten biscuits. Cookbook writer Martha Stuart Smith lamented the demise of beaten biscuits as far back as 1885, according to Grubb. Beaten biscuits required constant and vigorous attack by the cook. The dough took such a beating that no mere table was up to the task.

The recipe called for the cook to cut down a stout tree, preferably oak or chestnut, and to plane the stump into a work surface. A short-handled ax was also useful for working over the dough. Presumably the stump was good for at least a few biscuit-making episodes, Grubb says.

Although ax-wielding biscuit makers are rare these days, Grubb says Americans are still dedicated to putting a lot of time into the celebration.

“Rather than spending weeks saving eggs and storing vegetables, we spend our time shopping,” he says. “Rather than putting the burden of a large feast on one woman, we ask everyone to bring a dish or two.”