Keeping Christmas Well
We’re all familiar with Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in one form or another. We may never have read the original text, but there are so many adaptations that everyone knows “bah humbug” and “God bless us, everyone!” The name Scrooge serves as a synonym for a grumpy miser who hates Christmas.
As a huge Dickens fan who tends to be persnickety about adaptations, the problem I have with many versions is that they leave out the key to understanding the most important line of the original story. At the very end, right before Tiny Tim’s benediction, Dickens describes Scrooge after his redemption: “it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”
What does it mean to keep Christmas well?
Via the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, Scrooge learns what it means to keep Christmas well. He visits his former self, his clerk and nephew in the present, and the future that will be if he does not change his ways. Dickens uses the characters of Fezziwig (Scrooge’s boss when a young man), Bob Cratchit (his clerk), and Fred (his nephew) to emphasize his themes of using power well, the importance of family, and the healing work of laughter.
But the adaptations sometimes leave out the visits to total strangers, which is the key to keeping Christmas well.
The visits to strangers emphasize not only the ability of Christmas to knit us together but the need to extend the connection to humanity beyond those whom we know and love.
Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present visit a mine, a lighthouse, a ship, a hospital, a prison, and an almshouse — wherever “vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out” so that he could leave “his blessing” and teach “Scrooge his precepts.”
Those precepts connect back to the first ghost Scrooge sees, his former partner Marley, who states Dickens’ theme explicitly when he tells Scrooge that “Mankind was my business.”
To keep Christmas well, then, is not only to be with family and friends, though certainly togetherness is a theme of almost any Christmas story we could name. Keeping Christmas well includes strangers, in other words, for God to bless everyone, as Tiny Tim exclaims, and for us as fellow humans to extend that blessing.
While A Christmas Carol is quite secular at first glance with its emphasis on a businessman and three ghosts, Dickens admired the New Testament and knew it well, so certainly he recognized that Mary and Joseph were themselves strangers in Bethlehem. When including these visits to strangers in the story, Dickens surely was thinking of Jesus saying, “I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you received me in your homes, naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me, in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25: 35–36).
Scrooge’s reformation involves not merely giving Bob Crachit a raise to save Tiny Tim’s life but to share his wealth via charity. On Christmas day, he sees one of the men whom he had unceremoniously kicked out of his office the day before for daring to request funds to help the poor. He whispers a sum so large in the man’s ear that he causes the man to respond, “My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?”
He transforms from a man whose energy is so negative that even a blind man’s dog pulls him across the street so his master can avoid him to a man who looks “so irresistibly pleasant” that strangers greet him in the street with “Merry Christmas!”
Importantly, keeping Christmas well does not mean a few days or weeks of Christmas cheer, for Scrooge proclaims, “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”
Keeping Christmas well is a daily practice of connecting to all of humanity with kindness, love, and compassion. Scrooge kept it well. “May that be truly said of us, and all of us!”
