In the Workhouse : Christmas Day, better known by its first line, "It is Christmas Day in the workhouse", is a dramatic monologue written as a ballad by campaigning journalist George Robert Sims and first published in The Referee for the Christmas of 1877. It appeared in Sims' regular Mustard and Cress column under the pseudonym Dagonet and was collected in book form in 1881 as one of The Dagonet Ballads, which sold over 100,000 copies within a year.