Christmas Goose was apparently popular at some point. Why did people stop consuming it as a holiday food and why?

"Apparently" is the key word in your post, because that perception may not match the actual history.

This is discussed in the article "The Ideal Christmas Dinner" by Cathy Kaufman, published in the journal Gastronomica in 2004. As Kaufman argues, before Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, there were a rather wide variety of dishes associated with the Christmas holidays. Goose was one, and so was turkey, and so was just about every desirable type of meat. There wasn't a particularly strong connection with either one, nor with any of the other foods Dickens mentions in his story. The specific association of goose with Christmas was the result of Dickens' short story. Kaufman says that goose certainly was commonly consumed at Christmastime before Dickens came along, but it was just one among many meats consumed during the holidays:

"Dickens did not single-handedly invent the signature Cratchit meal; his legacy was in popularizing a very specific menu to the exclusion of other foods historically served at Christmas."

Before then, there wasn't such an association. To support this, Kaufman reprints a couple of lines from a popular tune in Virginia from the 1700s, with Christmas-associated lyrics:

"Beef, pork, and po[u]ltry now provide / To feast thy neighbours at this [Christmas]tide".

Before 1843, there wasn't a Christmas meat dish that was widely accepted. Instead, Christmas dishes were other parts of the meal. "The first Christmas recipes published in early American cookbooks," writes Kaufman, "were for confections and showed Dutch influences". These included cookies, doughnuts, and other sweets.

So, first, you can blame Dickens. But second, you can't really blame Dickens, because, while the "Christmas goose" association may have taken off elsewhere, it never really took hold in the United States, even if A Christmas Carol was tremendously popular from its first publication.

Instead, there was already an emerging association of turkey with Christmas, and Dickens' story didn't change that trajectory. It may have in the U.K. and elsewhere, though:

For example, the 1740 book Christmas Entertaiments: Wherein is Described Abundance of Fiddle-Faddle lists both turkey and geese among many other animals that would traditionally be paid in rent to a peasant's landlord around Christmastime, any one of which may be cooked for the Christmas feast at the lord's open house.

And then 120 years later, and twenty years after Dickens' book was published, the 1862 New American Cyclopaedia claimed in their article on turkey:

"Christmas in Europe and Thanksgiving in the northern and middle United States would be bereft of one of their most pleasant associations by the absence of a turkey at the family dinner; 300 years ago, the turkey formed the usual Christmas fare of the English farmer's table..."

But by 1927, an Australian newspaper reprinted a quote that claimed goose was "the national Christmas dish" in England. At the same time, it stated that goose "has been largely supplanted by the turkey" in recent times, despite the higher cost of turkey in comparison to goose, but nevertheless, "some may prefer the cheaper goose". So it would seem, the English had preferred turkey until Dickens came along, and then his connection of goose to Christmas was so effective that, by the early 1900s, the English were recognizing turkey as a newcomer.

In the U.S., though, this never happened the same way. Goose never successfully displaced turkey.

Why not? One reason may be that turkey was the more expensive and more desirable type of poultry, so Americans continued to buy it as a matter of status, if not taste. For example, the December 15, 1859, Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a piece that gave that Christmas season's typical market prices for various poultry, and turkey was the most expensive. Fattened geese were the same price as chickens, and wild geese was one of the least expensive.

In fact, Dickens himself was actually explicit about the class difference between the two birds. In his original text, the Cratchits eat a meager Christmas goose during the "Christmas Present" scenes, but then Scrooge buys the Cratchits "the prize turkey" hanging in the window at the end of the story - it was only later stage and screen adaptations that changed the bird at the end to a goose. (In the opening scene with the Ghost of Christmas Present, both turkeys and geese are present at the feast, along with several other meats.)

Another possible reason is, it may very well have been taste. The 1862 New American Cyclopaedia linked above claimed that turkey "is everywhere regarded...as the most delicious of the poultry tribe".

Another possible reason is one of practicality. Turkeys grow bigger, and when you have a lot of mouths to feed (such as in the large, rural families of the United States in the 19th century, remaining much more rural than the UK for longer), a turkey makes more sense than a goose, if you can afford it.

And another possible reason is national pride. Turkeys were sometimes recognized as a "national bird" of the United States (keep reading below), so why reject the delicious holiday staple for the Dickensian upstart alternative? In one interesting example, the December 24, 1880, Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote of the American District Telegraph Company's Christmas party for employees, where they gave away 113 "Christmas turkeys" to employees, as well as two hogs. Before the giveaway, one of the speakers at the party called the turkey a "bird of freedom", insinuating the turkey was something that Americans associated with their national identity.

Still, there may have been a time when turkey lagged behind goose as a consumed holiday dish in America. A November 1817 article first published in the New-York Commercial Advertiser, and picked up by other publications, claimed that in Connecticut that year, for Thanksgiving, 50,000 geese had been sold compared to only 5,500 turkeys. But it also says 65,000 chickens, 2,000 ducks, and 25,000 pounds of beef and pork were also sold. While this would indicate that geese were popular, they also weren't alone. But this may be an indication of price—those who could afford a turkey would buy one, and those who couldn't would settle for a goose. Further, many farmers didn't need to purchase turkeys at the market, since they raised them on their farm or else bartered with a neighbor for one of theirs. So this article may not reflect actual consumption, but only purchases. And regardless of all of this, this 1817 article also appears to be an exception to what is found in relation to the end-of-year holidays in the U.S. in the 19th century. By far, from the beginning of any association with a Christmas centerpiece dish in the United States, it's been turkey, not goose.

George Washington himself may lend some support to this: A purported Christmas menu served in 1790 at George Washington's Mount Vernon estate includes "Roast Turkey with Chestnut Stuffing", as well as mutton, roast beef, boiled beef, ham, suckling pig, oysters, herring, and rockfish—but no goose. Nor any other poultry besides turkey, for that matter.

Perhaps a better indication comes from the Santa Claus-promoting St. Nicholas Society in New York City in the mid-19th century. They would hold an annual banquet on St. Nicholas Day every year, with an extravagant menu. The 1861 and 1869 menus were reproduced in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper. Among the dishes served were three kinds of turkey (boiled, roasted, and "boned"), and several other types of poultry—chicken, partridge, quail, duck, and grouse. And many, many other types of meat as well—from turtles to buffalo tongues to hare to lobster to fois gras. But goose is nowhere to be found.

This, again, may go back to what Kaufman wrote. The Christmas holiday was very suppressed in New England until well into the 19th century (see the book The Battle For Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum for more discussion on that topic), which helped allow New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania emerge as the major public celebrants of Christmas in the early United States. So not only does that explain why the early Christmas dishes in American cookbooks are Dutch sweets, but it also may help explain the turkey connection. Wild turkeys still roamed the countryside in those days, and it was something of a tradition for the men in rural families of that part of the U.S. to engage in a "turkey hunt" on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning for the purposes of the holiday meal.

Or at least, a passage in James Fenimore Cooper's 1823 novel The Pioneers would have us believe. The family that stars in the book engages in such a hunt on Christmas Eve, taking place in the late 1700s in upstate New York. Whether it's romanticized or not, turkeys were certainly something that were on Cooper's mind when writing his depiction of a rural New York Christmas at the turn of the 19th century.

cont'd...