...And that was quite enough for him

Advent: Joy & Love in A Christmas Carol

The image above is a perfect representation of my earliest Christmas memories. My Pop used to dress up as Santa Claus and make an appearance at our family Christmas celebrations, bearing gifts and plenty of holiday spirit; these are some of my fondest remembrances of Pop. And Christmas.

Bringing gifts as Santa, the Santa Claus collection, the Dickens Village... my Pop loved Christmas. Maybe that's where I get it.

December 16th was Pop's birthday and to celebrate we watched A Christmas Carol - the 1951 black and white version with Alastair Sim. I love this adaptation for its relative accuracy and ridiculously dramatic music. I love this story for its message of redemption.

Throughout the novel, Dickens carefully skirts around the religious aspects of Christmas. He uses religious references, as he does throughout the rest of his novels, but doesn't include anything that would have caused sectarian debate. By doing this, Dickens satisfied the community of broadly religious readers while avoiding conflict.

And really, A Christmas Carol is not a Christmas story per se; it's a ghost story. The actual title of the novella reads: A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. At this point in his career, Dickens was becoming more aware of the many social injustices surrounding him; he uses the supernatural--the outrageous and the unexpected--to point out problems in the norm. In A Christmas Carol, he uses ghosts, spirits and the exceptionally miserly Scrooge.

On a brief side note: I just looked up the word "miserly" in my thesaurus. "Scroogelike" is a synonym. You know a book's a winner when the main character's name is still an adjective 168 years later.

And so we have a Christmas parable about economic man and social man.

There are so many brilliant little things about this story. But my favorite is the ending. I invite you to watch the following clip from the Alastair Sim version. Scrooge has just woken up from his night with the spirits of Christmas past, present and future:

At the very end of the novella, the omniscient narrator sums up Scrooge's transformation: "He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them, for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he though it quite as well that they should winkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him." (Dickens 218).

The redemption in this story is laughter. Joy.

Scrooge discovers the responsibility that we humans have to one another. This is a common theme throughout Dickens novels. People need to care for one another--love one another. From this lesson, Scrooge experiences a wonderful and contagious joy.

So okay, A Christmas Carol may not be a blatantly religious story. But it is spiritual story (A pun, yes? Still learning...) and has a clear Christmas message. Jesus' birth was the ultimate act of care and love for mankind; the miracle of Christmas resulted in joy and wonder. As I begin the final week of Advent, I want this Christmas spirit to permeate my life. Good will toward men. Laughter. Joy and love.


"...it was always said of [Scrooge], that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed that knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!"