So, I love Christmas. I really do. But one of my heresies is that I also love it when people hate Christmas, partly because it’s a purgative to all the parts of Christmas I don’t like (the list currently includes inflatable lawn ornaments, Celine Dion Christmas albums (or the like), LED reindeer antlers, the often suffocating omnipresence, and all the false pressures of things you think you have to do). So, yes, like most Christmas movies and TV specials, I subscribe to the idea that there is a Real Christmas and a Fake Christmas. I have my own line dividing the two, and I try to be tolerant, understanding that others have drawn different lines as may be dictated by religion or other matters of taste.

So, in the quest for a more real Christmas, a few years ago Terri and I bought an elaborately printed and annotated edition of A Christmas Carol. After years of seeing it recycled through innumerable film versions and sitcom plots, I wanted to actually read the real deal. I recommend actually reading it.

Scrooge is a Dickensian caricature of a skinflint. In film, it’s hard to make someone a caricature while keeping his point of view. In prose, this is possible; you can be right inside his heart and mind, even when he’s being a cantankerous miser. In film, when you are taken back in time to Scrooge’s former self, you do get the idea that he grew colder and harder very gradually over the years, without even noticing it. In prose, without an actor’s face in the way, you aren’t seeing this as something that happened to someone else. It encourages you to ask yourself, is the same thing happening to me?

Yes, there are a lot of things in it which make me wince (Tiny Tim, the precious tone of the first several paragraphs, and so on). But there’s more that I’m impressed with, like how well-realized the ghosts are, and the fact that there are ghosts (and nobody complains about Dickens slumming it with genre fiction).

And finally, I must come clean: the whole reason I wrote this was just to quote this little exchange (found here), which pretty much sums up why I love Christmas, and for that matter, pretty much all holidays.

“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

“Nephew!” returned the uncle, sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”

“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew: “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 at 11:45 pm and is filed under cultcha, personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.