Thomas, I took you up on your suggestion to read this piece and am happy to have found someone who appreciates Dickens so fully. He is my favourite writer and has a special shelf all to his own. We read the Christmas Carol every year as a family and I can never read the last page because it just makes me weep. "The decision is always there, waiting to be made. As is the opposite one, the one towards doom and death." Scrooges redemption reminds me every time of what I experienced in my own life (as I recounted in my pilgrimage post). The recognition that each person can make a choice toward life or toward death at any moment is so potent, especially when you realize that this is not a metaphor.
My love for the Christmas Carol runs so deep that I published a 'classic learner's edition' which includes the original text, a read-aloud version for families with younger kids (40 min with Dickens's original words), classical vocabulary study and Victorian parlour games. I wanted to make the book accessible to kids without loosing any of the vocabulary which is so uproariously humorous and rich. If you have younger children and want to take a look at the read-aloud you can download it for free on my site here https://humanitasfamily.net/books/.
Thanks again and I look forward to dipping into more of your writing (saw you have one on Momo which we have on a shelf upstairs).
"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)."
The underlying optimism is part of what makes these articles so enjoyable. Nearly everything else I read these days (written recently) lies somewhere between cynical and nihilistic. It's a bit boring to be honest, especially given that I share your optimistic view of things.
Life's a lot better when you believe that everything will always work out in the end - however naive some people may find that viewpoint to be.
"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."
This seems to be universal - all you want to do is stay home, watch movies, and enjoy your presents, but instead, you're dragged from place-to-place and forced into the same awful conversations with near-strangers.
"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."
Good fiction is better than any book on psychology for understanding people. Read fiction as if it were non-fiction and see how many lessons on human nature you pick up.
"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."
Had the feeling walking would come into this at some point - I promise I'll go out in the cold after I finish typing. I blame the Irish Winter for my lack of novels.
"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)."
Likewise. I have to force myself to read books without taking notes, and promise myself that I'll make them on the second pass through - it usually takes away from the experience to try and analyse everything on the first go. Not to mention that it takes ages to actually finish the book.
Great piece Tom, and I'm going to go and read a Christmas Carol now after this. I'd only seen the movie up until now (mildly ashamed of this), but it's never a bad time to read more of Dickens.
Always appreciate you emphasising the importance of reading good fiction - if more men put down the business books and just read stories, they would be a lot happier, more creative, and almost certainly a lot less boring.
There's something about rapid consumption of one-idea (being generous) business and self-development books that makes one liable to speaking in meaningless jargon and lacking an appreciation for the important things in life - everything beautiful.
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;
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.
Thomas, I took you up on your suggestion to read this piece and am happy to have found someone who appreciates Dickens so fully. He is my favourite writer and has a special shelf all to his own. We read the Christmas Carol every year as a family and I can never read the last page because it just makes me weep. "The decision is always there, waiting to be made. As is the opposite one, the one towards doom and death." Scrooges redemption reminds me every time of what I experienced in my own life (as I recounted in my pilgrimage post). The recognition that each person can make a choice toward life or toward death at any moment is so potent, especially when you realize that this is not a metaphor.
My love for the Christmas Carol runs so deep that I published a 'classic learner's edition' which includes the original text, a read-aloud version for families with younger kids (40 min with Dickens's original words), classical vocabulary study and Victorian parlour games. I wanted to make the book accessible to kids without loosing any of the vocabulary which is so uproariously humorous and rich. If you have younger children and want to take a look at the read-aloud you can download it for free on my site here https://humanitasfamily.net/books/.
Thanks again and I look forward to dipping into more of your writing (saw you have one on Momo which we have on a shelf upstairs).
"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)."
The underlying optimism is part of what makes these articles so enjoyable. Nearly everything else I read these days (written recently) lies somewhere between cynical and nihilistic. It's a bit boring to be honest, especially given that I share your optimistic view of things.
Life's a lot better when you believe that everything will always work out in the end - however naive some people may find that viewpoint to be.
"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."
This seems to be universal - all you want to do is stay home, watch movies, and enjoy your presents, but instead, you're dragged from place-to-place and forced into the same awful conversations with near-strangers.
"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."
Good fiction is better than any book on psychology for understanding people. Read fiction as if it were non-fiction and see how many lessons on human nature you pick up.
"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."
Had the feeling walking would come into this at some point - I promise I'll go out in the cold after I finish typing. I blame the Irish Winter for my lack of novels.
"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)."
Likewise. I have to force myself to read books without taking notes, and promise myself that I'll make them on the second pass through - it usually takes away from the experience to try and analyse everything on the first go. Not to mention that it takes ages to actually finish the book.
Great piece Tom, and I'm going to go and read a Christmas Carol now after this. I'd only seen the movie up until now (mildly ashamed of this), but it's never a bad time to read more of Dickens.
Always appreciate you emphasising the importance of reading good fiction - if more men put down the business books and just read stories, they would be a lot happier, more creative, and almost certainly a lot less boring.
There's something about rapid consumption of one-idea (being generous) business and self-development books that makes one liable to speaking in meaningless jargon and lacking an appreciation for the important things in life - everything beautiful.
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.
Lovely read. Thanks for putting so much effort in these newsletters :)
Excellent take on a classic story and how it came to be. The lesson for me? Just write the story.
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.