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.

A colourised illustration from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a book which I suspect is not as widely read today as it should be. It’s well worth it, by the way.

“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.

Until next time,

Live Well,

Tom.

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