Rereading A Christmas Carol
Commonplace Newsletter #021
Not long now. Just a handful of sleeps until Christmas, and just a handful more until the end of this tumultuous year.
(I can see why some have argued that ‘may you live in interesting time’ is meant as a curse rather than a blessing. I disagree, but I get it.)
And so Christmas is of course what we are going to talk about today. I’m generally loathe to write moment-specific essays- I’d rather aim for the harder target of timelessness than hit the easier mark of being merely timely- but for Christmas I’ll make an exception. And no this (hopefully) won’t be a polemic against the commercialisation of the season- we bash crass consumerism practically every week here so my Christmas gift to you will be to give you a blessed reprieve from this.
Instead I’m just going to riff on generosity and good cheer and all of those other Yuletide tropes.
I hope you enjoy it.
“The Happiness He Gives Is Quite As Great, As If It Cost A Fortune.”
An unpopular opinion that I truthfully hold is that Dickens, if anything, is currently underrated. That seems a strange thing to say about one of the most financially and artistically successful writers of all time but the fact remains.
In the same way that Shakespeare invented dozens, hundreds of new words and iconic phrases that have become an unremarked upon aspect of our every day speech, so has the legacy of Dickens disappeared below the surface of the wider public consciousness. Until, that is, December rolls around. And so in a way it has proven for me too.
I love Christmas and I am a sentimentalist at heart (any faux Bernard Blackian cynicism and misanthropy that leaks into these missives is nearly always a ruse for comic effect). And so it is usually at this time of year that I remember just how good Dickens is.
And I realised recently as I re-read both a Christmas Carol and the old issues of these newsletters that the simple philosophy that Dickens expounds through the story of Scrooge and Bob Cratchit et al is essentially the same as the worldview that I am trying to get across here each week.
Namely that it is greed and covetousness that forge the chains around our necks and that the way to be free of them is to be more compassionate (to both self and others) and more generous of both resources and spirit.
Essentially, my ethical stance is similar to both Dickens and also the bipartite position propounded by the 20th century moral philosophers Preston and Logan, to wit: ‘be excellent to each other’ and ‘party on dudes.’
See, we get wrapped up in ourselves and our striving and our mediated desires that we forget about simple commensality and fun and togetherness. And so Christmas becomes evermore freighted with importance because all of the other reflective landmarks of the year- solstices, Saints Days, season changes - have either become just another day of work or else have been sanitised, trivialised or commercialised into bland meaninglessness.
I apologise for getting heavy-handed there but truth must be spoken. We live to work and don’t work to live and then wonder why we are in the mess we are in. Christmas Day is one of the few remaining reminders of this, though many manage to bring that stressed out, checklist mentality to even this most blessed of days.
Dickens tried to tell us. Scrooge, we should understand, is both modern in his outlook- I’ve heard many contemporary people make variations of the humbug ‘If they would rather die, they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population’ argument- and he is also, by our current atrophied standards, successful. He has money and a good career and employees and prestige. He has savings. Of course he is also miserable and a net negative on all of those who are unfortunate enough to encounter him.
Until he sees the light, that is.
As Light As A Feather, As Happy As An Angel, As Merry As A Schoolboy
Holidays represent not only chance for reflection but also for rehabilitation and reorientation. For redemption. Cruelty and meanness and stinginess and rage and hurt and everything else can all be let go of and turned away from. In an instant. Like old Ebenezer you can have a change of heart in the truest sense. You can go to bed as one thing and wake up as another.
This is why Scrooge’s story resonates and has been adapted and retold more times than one can possibly count. Because it is true. All great stories are true stories, not in terms of their veracity or factual merit but in terms of their resonance and deeper spiritual insight.
There is truth beyond mere facts, truth beyond truth.
As I seem to say nearly every week here, your life is your life. You get to choose. And part of this choosing, this fundamental existential freedom in the face of whatever hardships or circumstances you have been dealt is that you can choose to change. To be better.
Even someone as alienated and separated and divorced from the rest of humanity as Scrooge, even someone as rigid and immovable and seemingly doomed as that man can turn things around with a simple decision.
The decision is always there, waiting to be made. As is the opposite one, the one towards doom and death. This is what makes life such an adventure, this is what makes stories great.
You get to choose.
In fact Dickens himself made such a decision. By late 1843 Dickens was in financial trouble with falling sales, a threat from his publishers that they were reducing his income and a fifth child on the way. He chose to go on. He chose to continue following the path of his gift and of his convictions.
And so he wrote.
In faith he wrote a book in six weeks. He called it ‘A Christmas Carol’. He said later that it was ‘written in white heat’. Every day he wrote and every evening he composed further scenes in his head as he walked some fifteen or twenty miles through the streets of London.
By early December the book was finished. By the 19th of December it was published. And, as is only fitting, by Christmas Eve it was entirely sold out and Dickens’s life and legacy were permanently changed for the better.
That is the story I am going to leave you with today. Because that is what Christmas is all about, the transformative nature of the faith that is shown by giving away your gifts.
Now, I could talk all day about A Christmas Carol itself, about Bob Crackitt and Tiny Time and The Ghost of Christmas Present and all the rest of it. But you already know all about them. And I can hardly say anything about them that has not been said before and better, or that is not given its definitive expression in the work itself.
See, great stories are their own reward. They are emanations that do not require explication. They just are.
The best things in life are to be experienced before they are understood. Like a Christmas. They do not require summaries and crib sheets and think pieces (tempting as those things are to create for people like me). Such supplementary things almost always serve as merely dim and inferior replacements.
As it says on the festive Coca Cola truck that I saw driving through town the other day: Always the real thing.
That’s a good rule to live by, that.
So the point of this newsletter, the call to action is simply this: Go and read A Christmas Carol. It’s short. It’s in the public domain. It’s entertaining. Go and read the real thing.
And you may find, if you have an open heart and a willing spirit and a modicum of courage, that it just may change you life.
I've never read "A Christmas Carol", so I followed your advice and did it last night. Put warmth in my heart, thanks.
I think it’s safe to say all of us do not agree with all our family. Hell, most of us barely agree with our parents! But what is Christmas if, as you elegantly put it, a special day? Almost an esoteric day, even. A day to make tabula rasa of all past deeds and for at least a few days, make peace with those closest to us. Maybe it’s not always a new beginning, but a sacred time to pause and reflect. Like those snowballs globes with a joyful scene fixed in time that we forget in a corner of the house until it’s the holidays and we remember to shake them one more time and let the magic snow inside.
Whatever your hardships, whatever the griefs you hold against your own kin; this year – this year especially – try to put them aside, at least for a few days. Go back to the old snowball globe and remember the good times, the hopes and how good it felt all together. And try to shake the globe, one more time. See how it makes you feel. And if you’re feeling angry towards yourself, if you’re feeling let down, stuck or at your rope’s end, just wait for a few days. Suspend your thoughts and allow yourself some peace. Don’t worry, you’ll still find your troubles and shortcomings and insecurities afterwards, but just lay down the arms for a brief moment. See where that leads you. Who knows? That’s the magic of Christmas after all.
There’s a movie I love to rewatch almost every Christmas - It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s stupidly common and totally cliché I know, but it embodies the same lessons and the same emotions as A Christmas Carol; you only have one life and so many people that (could) care for you. Don’t let life get in the way and take that from you. Keep the flame going. In the movie, the angel Clarence tells George Bailey that if he can make him love his life again, then he’ll earn his angel’s wings. In a way, I can imagine Thomas as a Clarence figure. Someone who’s gone against this year’s wind and helped us appreciate both the profund and the little aspects of life; someone who will not hold our hands, but also someone who will not bring us down and feed us easy and more profitable nihilism. Someone who managed to stand straight despite the personal hardships and delusions and who shows up every week to talk to us not as followers, but as peers; someone who’s always giving more than expected and asks almost nothing in return. For that, I’d like to thank him and, like in the last scene of the movie, say to him;
“Thank you for the wings, Thomas”
Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones.
I am someone who has become hyper rational over the past few years of my life. Too rational. Too thinking orientated. I have a training in mathematics and focus on this area professionally. I am naturally prone to thinking in optimization terms. Very much the 4 hour work week model.
I have spent some of my time in lockdown reading Tolstoy. I have been struck by how he discusses the idea of faith. Faith, to a rational man, is something to be scorned. I am starting to question this more and more.
I have always loved Christmas ever since I was a child. I'm not religious anymore but I still love Christmas. Through reading Tolstoy I've realized something which what I think you're highlighting here, namely, that you should put experience ahead of thinking. I get the feeling of Christmas only when I do Christmassy things. Maybe I would feel more Christian if I started doing more Christian things? Maybe ones religion isn't something to be thought about, it's something to be lived.
Being separated from my friends and family this year due to COVID has forced me to make it Christmas myself. I have made a pudding for the first time, sent Christmas cards, given gifts in small ways to those around me that I don't know.
"That is the story I am going to leave you with today. Because that is what Christmas is all about, the transformative nature of the faith that is shown by giving away your gifts."
This line brought tears to my eyes. It is the perfect articulation of what I've been sensing over the past weeks as I finished reading Anna Karenina and have tried to make a Christmas away from home.
Thank you for your newsletters and for helping to articulate those feelings that someone like me who is more thinking orientated finds it difficult to access and pinpoint. Happy Christmas. Looking forward to more of your writing in the new year.