“Scrooge refuses to behave according to the rules of literary taste - and that’s part of his appeal.”
There’s more good stuff in this Michael Faber essay on A Christmas Carol than I can quote here, but here’s a sample.
Modern readers, who may associate Christmas with adherence to long-established, commercialised rituals, may find this emphasis on adventure and caprice a bit overdone. But we need to understand that at the time when A Christmas Carol was published, Christmas had not yet succumbed to the formulas that rule it today. Presents were often home-made, decorations were improvised. Shop-bought Christmas cards had only just been invented and would not become common until the 1880s. Queen Victoria’s husband Albert tried to introduce the Christmas tree (”that pretty German toy”, as Dickens calls it in an 1850 essay), but the idea was slow to catch on. A strange new American import - the turkey - was muscling in on the traditional goose. Santa Claus did not yet exist (he has a complicated derivation, in part from A Christmas Carol’s Ghost of Christmas Present). Basically, the early Victorians were unsure how a rural festival like Yuletide could be celebrated by busy city-folk in the industrial age - and Dickens took it upon himself to tell them.
[via Bookslut]