Christmas is About the Past

Christmas is the ageless celebration of goodwill, relived in tales of death and redemption, and carried by the spirits who walk among the living.

When Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, the holiday itself had fallen on hard times. Once a great medieval feast day, by the end of the 18th century, Christmas wasn’t the vast Anglo-European festival it has since become. In the churning commerce and endless labor of the Industrial Revolution, it wasn’t even a holiday. It held no commercial value. Dickens tapped into a Christmas revival of the early Victorians, and helped to popularize annual family gatherings, gift giving, caroling, special foods and feasts, decorations and public charity.

But A Christmas Carol is, of course, one of the great ghost stories of English literature: the ageless tale of death and redemption, and the spirits who walk among the living, occasionally taking an active role in their lives.

Dickens understands that the celebration of Christmas - coming in the darkest cold days of the year in England but celebrating an ancient and holy birth - was essentially a feast day of the past, with a subtle sense of melancholy and longing (both of which are particularly sharp for me this particular Christmas Eve). While the early Dickens dialogue can seem stilted to our modern ears, the description of the scenes remains piercing 180 years later - for example, this portrait of Scrooge’s bed chamber fireplace.

It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh’s daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts; and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet’s rod, and swallowed up the whole.

Much of the Dickensian enthusiasm for Christmas was actually an import - or a re-import - via the American writer Washington Irving, whose ghosts still roam these hills of the Hudson Valley. In the very collection of stories that introduced Rip Van Winkle, and his mourning for a life slumbered away, came takes of the “old English Christmas” that helped to re-popularize the feast day, and inspired Dickens himself to make Christmas the setting for his most-dramatized work.

Going to bed on Christmas Eve in an old English manor house, Irving’s American traveler feels a ghostly presence. “As I passed through the hall on my way to my chamber, the dying embers of the Yule-clog still sent forth a dusky glow, and had it not been the season when “no spirit dares stir abroad,” I should have been half tempted to steal from my room at midnight and peep whether the fairies might not be at their revels about the hearth.”

And the next morning, comes the transformation. “When I woke the next morning it seemed as if all the events of the preceding evening had been a dream, and nothing but the identity of the ancient chamber convinced me of their reality. While I lay musing on my pillow I heard the sound of little feet pattering outside of the door, and a whispering consultation. Presently a choir of small voices chanted forth an old Christmas carol, the burden of which was—

Rejoice, our Saviour he was born

On Christmas Day in the morning.

All the best Christmas movies focus on the spirits, childhood or decisions of the past. It’s A Wonderful Life with its moral tale of a good man never having been born. The Bishop’s Wife and the story of a spirit transforming complicated modern lives. Even Clark Griswold crying his eyes out at old family movies while trapped in the attic in Christmas Vacation. It’s always about the ghosts of Christmas past. And those who have gone before who once sat at the table.

Dickens wrote many Christmas stories, and wrote Christmas into many of his longer novels as well. Five years after Ebenezer Scrooge, he published The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-Time, the tale of a chemistry professor who is granted the power to erase painful memories by a mysterious ghost - but of course, he learns the errors of his ways on Christmas morning.

At such a time, the Christmas music he had heard before, began to play. He listened to it at first, as he had listened in the church-yard; but presently—it playing still, and being borne towards him on the night air, in a low, sweet, melancholy strain—he rose, and stood stretching his hands about him, as if there were some friend approaching within his reach, on whom his desolate touch might rest, yet do no harm. As he did this, his face became less fixed and wondering; a gentle trembling came upon him; and at last his eyes filled with tears, and he put his hands before them, and bowed down his head.

His memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble, had not come back to him; he knew that it was not restored; he had no passing belief or hope that it was. But some dumb stir within him made him capable, again, of being moved by what was hidden, afar off, in the music. If it were only that it told him sorrowfully the value of what he had lost, he thanked Heaven for it with a fervent gratitude.

We need the past, even when it’s painful. These are the shortest and darkest days of the year. Chanukah lamps do not go out. Kwanzaa candles burn brightly. And Christmas lights are everywhere, from the churches to every street you might traverse. Our shared celebration may be as secular and cultural as it is religious. But the vast and incessant commercialization of the holiday and its recent emphasis on wealth, consumption, and showy egos - think omnipresent commercials for $100,000 cars as Christmas presents or the spray paint cans of gold at Mar-a-Lago - can’t really erase the spirit of charity and goodwill that the Victorian writers injected into the DNA of of the holiday. It’s there for future generations.