(Originally posted yesterday in the wrong forum, where it has been deleted and moved here.)
It's just a "little" book, but it packs a wallop bigger than the most potent Christmas punch.
Written in 1843, "A Christmas Carol," the novella (or long short story) is a perennial favorite, more ubiquitous than the other two members of the Yuletide triumvirate, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite and Handel's The Messiah. Stage adaptations of the Charles Dickens piece -- performed by a spectrum of actors from schoolchildren to professional touring companies -- dot the theatrical landscape from coast to coast.
The jaded among us may wonder why this old roasted chestnut is still popular in the twentieth century. The current economic collapse aside, many Americans approach the holiday season with dread because it's "too commercial" (a comment, by the way, ironically made by the money-loving Scrooge himself in the 1984 George C. Scott CBS-tv version.) Having been scorned by our Pilgrim forefathers, Christmas wasn't even recognized as a national holiday until the mid-nineteenth century. Yet the national Ideal of what Christmas should be has descended down to us from Britain, where Queen Victoria celebrated Christmas with German-infected customs. Earlier in the century, Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall, which described the holiday as celebrated in a English country house, made many of the former colonists nostalgic for a Yuletide with all the holly and ivy trimmings.
A Christmas Carol embodies such a Victorian spirit.
Dickens reportedly said that he had initially written the piece as a "pot-boiler," (i.e. for money), but that it was the only one of his works that made him laugh and cry. The near laughable cheapness Scrooge exhibits becomes downright meanness in his consummate dismissal of the plight of the Poor: "Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?" He disdains the celebration of Christmas as a "humbug," and rejecting such extends to his indifference toward Christianity: truly he loves money more than he loves his neighbor. Ebenezer Scrooge, whose surname has come down through the language as a synonym for a surly and flinty miser, is the ultimate comic-slash-tragic figure, a true protagonist because he changes: at the beginning of the story his character is one thing, and by the end has become the complete antithesis of what he formerly was.
Another reason for the story's durability is its emphasis on family values, and I say this completely without irony. Bob Cratchit, the hardworking clerk, has a brood arguably too large to support on the meager salary which Scrooge pays him. But the abiding love the Cratchits hold for one another is the key to their survival. The youngest son, Tim, suffers from a terminal illness, and he needs a crutch to walk. Such sentimental pulling at the reader's heartstrings could facilely be deemed bathos; even Dickens himself was no stranger to crowd-pleasing emotionalism, Oscar Wilde's famous quotation about the death of Little Nell coming to mind. Yet consider the role which Tiny Tim's character plays in this story; he symbolizes not something else but Someone Else, the "reason for the season," so to speak. In the vision forced upon Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Tiny Tim dies, but in the final scenes showing Scrooge's no-less-than-miraculous conversion, becomes "resurrected" in a way. Indeed, only by being forced by The Ghost of Christmas Present to witness Tim's suffering as well as Bob's even deeper anguish does Scrooge begin to feel anything akin to compassion. Other scenes in the piece are rich in Christian allegory: the haggling over the "deceased" Scrooge's bed curtains parodies the casting of the money changers out of the temple, and Scrooge's harrowing soul-searching in the climactic graveyard scene seems like a personal Gethsemane for him. For Dickens's literary treatments of Christian imagery, only the self-sacrifice of Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities comes close to a superb treatment of Christian imagery.
It's always darkest, it's said, before the dawn. Even in pre-Christian times, the Winter Solstice was a supernatural symbol. The sun has reached its lowest point in the sky, it is the shortest day of the year, yet, and yet-- little by little, the sun rises a bit higher, the day becomes gradually longer and longer. The darkness dies and the Light appears. There is no better analogy for the human spirit of hope, which is undeniably the "take home" message of "A Christmas Carol." Even the most hardest of hearts can soften, and it truly is never too late to transform despair into hope. Like Scrooge, people can change -- sometimes literally overnight.
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