Ebenezer's Legacy

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A couple of weeks ago my younger daughter, knowing of my lifelong affection for Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and buttered theater popcorn, wrote to urge us to see the recently released, The Man Who Invented Christmas. We did and it proved a delight. The film, which depicts the variety of personal and professional pressures and convictions that led to the novel's completion, is a kaleidoscopic construction in which the characters of the incubating narrative wander through Dickens’s real life much like Scrooge and his ghostly companions wander unseen through Scrooge's past and present lives in the completed novel. 

Other than recommending it, I will not dip deeply into the film. That is not the purpose of this post. However, I must offer a word of caution. If you are among the handful of unfortunate souls in the world who have neither read nor seen A Christmas Carol, you must remedy that sad situation before seeing The Man Who Invented Christmas. I suppose the film would still engage the unprepared viewer, but knowledge of the original text adds significant spice to the dish.  

The novel is widely available in both digital and analog media. To my mind, it is one of those works that particularly lends itself to the turning of physical pages. A comfortable chair and some mulled wine further enhances the experience. If you prefer your fiction on the big - or little- screen, I strongly recommend the George C. Scott version. Others have portrayed Scrooge well. Scott becomes him. The attentive parent will shield their young children from the Disney version. The damage this travesty can visit upon the evolving brain is still uncertain, but in this unfortunate instance one cannot be too careful. 

While The Man Who Invented Christmas is a welcome addition to the Christmas Carol universe, I came away from the film thinking more about the original work. It strikes me that the actual world to which the three spirits led Scrooge that Christmas morning had changed not a whit from the one realized in the Christmas Eve before. What had changed was how Scrooge saw the world. 

It was a profound change. In the course of a few short hours Scrooge morphs from a miserly misanthropic pessimist to a gregarious generous optimist. In The Man Who Invented Christmas Dickens, as the author, agonizes over the seeming improbability of such a transformation. In the end it is "the Scrooge character in Dickens's head" who sways him. Standing in his own grave the changed Scrooge promises, "I will honor Christmas in my heart!" And Dickens, finally realizing the power of that sentiment, captures the words on paper, and with the novelist's omnipotence, makes it so and ends the book. 

Christmas was, in Dickens' era, a minor holiday often viewed suspiciously by the Anglican Church of the time as having pagan roots. As such, it makes sense that the dominant theme of the work is social rather than religious. As Scrooge's nephew Fred puts it, "I have always thought of Christmas time…as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they were really fellow-passengers to the grave and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

This sweeping, secular definition of Christmas is a call to a compassionate optimism that in those days was economically feasible only for the gentry. Today, in our hopefully more permeable society, it is an option open to us all. It is a choice we can shoulder in the face of a cynical pessimism that advocates behaviors and social policies that spring from a fear that some pernicious "other" will steal what is rightfully ours. Following this path of cynical pessimism leaves us as snarling dogs fighting over a single bone, blind to the feast that surrounds us.

Pessimism, then, is a self-protective worldview with its roots in fear. From the point of view of the pessimist, one must seek to beat a punitive fate to the punch. If I habitually assume the worst will happen, it hurts a little less when I am proven right.

Optimism however requires the courage of hope. Yes, things may go badly, but I choose to believe they will not. Furthermore, if things do go astray, I hope to have the courage to carry on and seek the silver lining of whatever clouds I may encounter.

It is this compassionate optimistic worldview that is Ebenezer Scrooge's legacy - should we choose to accept it. This is Dickens's pantheistic spirit of Christmas, the one his protagonist urges us to honor in our hearts. It is not a simplistic Pollyanna optimism. It is rather a worldview of hope chosen in the face of an often capricious realty. It comes with its share of bruises. But, more often it brings the gift of a quiet enlightenment that allows us to echo Tiny Tim - who remember, did not die - and say, "God bless us, everyone!"

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