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A Christmas Carol by the celebrated social novelist Charles Dickens told of the hardship faced in Victorian England by a poverty-stricken office clerk during Christmas week, with hardly any money to feed his family.
Luckily for the family, the infamous employer Ebenezer Scrooge was haunted by the ghosts of past, present and future, and ensured his employee had a Christmas Day to remember.
Fast forward more than 170 years to 2014 and thousands of poverty-hit families in Britain will this week be enjoying a Christmas feast courtesy of groceries supplied by food banks.
The leading voluntary group supplying food, the Trussell Trust estimates that more than 25,000 Christmas Hampers will be handed to British families this week to ensure families do not go hungry during the biggest feast in Christendom, celebrating the birth of Jesus.
Last December the trust's foodbanks supplied food to more than 100,000 families, and this year the number is expected to be even higher.
Many of the more than 420 foodbanks now operating in Britain will also be supplying traditional turkeys this year to ensure Christmas isn't cancelled for thousands of families.
The stark realities of poor families in Christmas Week comes just days after a major debate in the British House of Commons about the rise in the number of food banks now operating across the country.
The Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Labor's Maria Eagle said in 2009-10 the number of British families using food banks stood at 41,000. In 2013-14 the number, she said, has rocketed to 913,000.
The Trussell Trust expects the number to exceed one million when the next set of annual figures are released in 2015.
Eagle said: "The recent all-party parliamentary inquiry into hunger in the UK, entitled 'Feeding Britain', said that 4 million people are at risk of going hungry, 3.5 million adults cannot afford to eat properly, and half a million children live in families that cannot afford to feed them."
"Nobody would choose to go to a food bank if they had any other option. Research indicates the truth of what many of us who have visited our local food banks have seen," said Eagle.
"People are acutely embarrassed to have to go to a food bank. They feel ashamed to have to accept such help, but the research is clear: people turn to food banks as a last resort, when all other coping strategies have failed," added Eagle.
She said more than 20 percent of people using food banks are employed, but struggling on low pay, a group known as the "working poor".
The majority, though, of people desperate for food parcels need help because of delays and problems with the welfare system, said the politician.
Another Labor MP Luciana Berger said she had been told about people rummaging through waste food skips to find food to eat.
"There are the mums who are going without food, teachers who say children are turning up at school hungry because they have nothing to eat at home, and the councillors who are handing out food from the back of their cars. I have spoken to people suffering from malnutrition because they cannot afford food. It is a scandal in 21st century Britain," Berger said.
A spokeswoman for the Trussell Trust said Monday: "Christmas is a particularly stark time for people in poverty. People have told us they cannot even walk along high streets where shops are all decorated and displaying things they cannot possibly buy or afford."
"However the generosity of the British people is overwhelming. We have just completed a food collection week in partnership with Tesco (one of Britain's leading supermarket chains) and customers amazingly donated more than 4 million meals in one week for our food banks," said the spokeswoman.
