Keep the holiday spirit throughout the year
“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year”
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol
’Tis the season to be jolly and write my holiday column as has been my tradition now for 15 years.
This year, I’m going to focus on A Christmas Carol and its wonderful two main characters – Tiny Tim and Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens’ story is universal and can be appreciated by everyone, regardless of religious affiliation.
Written more than 160 years ago in 1843, it begins with three un-festive words: “Marley was dead.” Yet, unknowingly, Dickens and his story did as much to invent modern Christmas as anyone.
And, he did it with virtually no reference to religion. It’s centered on the renewal of human spirit.
At the time, Christmas was not held in universal high esteem in England. The House of Commons sat on Christmas day. Sheriffs were sent to require merchants to open for business. Pro- and anti-Christian factions rioted.
Holding Christmas down as a high festival of sentiment and material comforts probably had its origins during Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell’s time in the 1640s. He held the Puritan view of Christmas, which was “... an extreme forgetfulness of Christ by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights.”
Except in the South, which has celebrated Christmas since the 17th century, Christmas was not a legal holiday in the United States. In 1874, Henry Ward Beecher, America’s most prominent preacher at the time, said, “To me, Christmas is a foreign day.” It was not until 1885 that President Chester Arthur signed a law making Christmas a federal holiday.
Dickens was just 31 in 1843. Some say he was still tormented by painful memories of youthful privation – his father in debtors’ prison, himself toiling under terrible working conditions in a factory. Child labor and the plight of the poor were at the center of his thinking.
Orwell described Dickens as “generously angry” and observed that his doctrine could be reduced to just 10 words: “If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.”
Dickens believed that a change of hearts was the key to changing society. Karl Marx, who, in 1894, settled in London not far from Dickens, was a strong admirer of his description of the ills of society.
Travel back in time with me for a brief moment. It’s Dec. 24, 1843. A cobblestone street in central London. An overcast, damp, cold late afternoon. People scurrying home for Christmas Eve. Most are desperately poor and hungry.
“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice.
“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money?”
“Christmas is a good time,” replied his nephew. “A kind, forgiving, charitable time.…”
A Christmas Carol speaks to rebirth of the human spirit and the redemption on Earth, not only of Scrooge, but of all mankind. Isn’t that what the spirit of Christmas is all about?
How did Dickens approach Scrooge’s rebirth and redemption?
“Ghost of the future!” [Scrooge] exclaimed. “I fear you more than any specter I have seen.” Scrooge sees his own corpse as he “... lay in the dark, empty house with not a man, a woman or child to say that he had been kind …” to them in any way.
The third ghost was the one Scrooge feared the most. The ghost of Christmas Future, a “draped and hooded” inevitable face of death, caused Scrooge to turn his life around. And that’s the real message of Christmas, to become the Ebenezer of Christmas Day rather than the Scrooge of Christmas Eve. Scrooge made his mistakes, but he figured life out and turned it around.
“I am a mortal,” Scrooge remonstrated, “and liable to fall.”
“Bear but a touch of my hand there,” said the spirit, laying it upon Ebenezer’s heart. “And you shall be upheld in more than this.”
“Love one another,” Dickens urges, “or die unloved.”
Through Scrooge we discover the potential, for ourselves and everyone, to turn our lives around. That it is better to give than to receive. Or, as in Luke 6:38, “Give and it will be given to you.”
We learn that, in the end, the things that count most in life are those things that cannot he counted. May we, as urged by Dickens, try to keep the spirit of Christmas in our hearts all the coming year. And, as observed by the least of all, Tiny Tim, may God bless us, everyone!
Peace.
Douglas H. Thompson, Jr., CPA
President, CPA Mutual
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