Every holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, thousands of re-enactors, literary-boosters and antiques-buffs converge on the Cow Palace to honor one of Britain’s most famed novelists: Charles Dickens.

The Dickens Fair, now in its tenth consecutive season, offers fans of Dickensian London a chance to recreate the Victorian Era settings for novels such as “A Christmas Carol” and “Oliver Twist,” to name a couple. Although the fair has been in existence since 1970, the difficulty of finding a location for the large-scale event lead to a brief hiatus after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.

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Professional actors and amateur theatrical types alike take a day off from twenty-first century hustle and bustle to provide a respite from the crass consumerism that dominates much of the holiday season, said Shannon Domnivitz, the event’s marketing director.

One of the main appeals, she said, is “the idea that you can step into this environment and really escape … that you can have no sense of the outside world. Cars, computers, television — none of that exists within this world, so you really get to time travel,” she added.

For Barbara Ebel, a 34-year-old SF State alumna, the biggest draw is the elaborate recreation of the costumes, the vintage dance and the level of detail that goes into the production of the event.

“It’s a lot of fun, and even beyond the theatricality, I love dancing — it’s amazing,” said Ebel, a professional costume maker for the San Francisco Opera. “There’s an element of theater — formal and improv — but there’s also a really strong human connection you can make that you wouldn’t necessarily make on a stage. There’s an element of real life that comes in that sort of enriches the whole thing.”