It seems in recent years, especially in popular media (e.g. "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), there's this idea that Christmas wasn't important to the average person. This strikes me as wrong, but I don't know much about the historical celebration of the holiday outside of other works of fiction (e.g. depictions of celebrations in "War and Peace").

So my question is multipart: 1) Was Christmas a "minor liturgical holiday" before Dickens? 2) If it was minor, is that throughout Christendom, limited to the Anglospheeic countries, or only in the UK? 3) Was the holiday more or less important across social classes?

To clarify, by "important" I don't mean so much in the religious sense, but in the festive and sentimental sense.