Memories of Christmases past run deep through the colorful history of Denver, among the first of the Great Plains settlements to urbanize. Englishwoman Rose Georgina Kingsley—eldest daughter of controversial Anglican priest, social reformer and writer Charles Kingsley and sister of Victorian novelist Mary St. Leger Kingsley (pseudonym Lucas Malet)—journaled one of the earliest recollections of how Denverites celebrated yuletide.
In 1870 John Evans completed the Denver Pacific Railway, linking its namesake city to Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, on the Union Pacific section of the transcontinental railroad. That same year William Jackson Palmer’s Kansas Pacific reached Denver. Their completion
