Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I can't remember what age I was when I first began to read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and as have most people, I have seen many versions of it over the years. It was my first Dickens novel, and over the years, I read so many others--Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, The Story of David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit-- every one I could get my hands on.  In my heart of hearts, it wasn't Henry James or William Faulkner or Mark Twain or James Baldwin.  I loved Dickens best of all at least until I was 30.  Although I was sternly warned that he wasn't deep, that his wit and sensibility were too obvious, his laughter and sentimentality too grandiose, I threw caution to the wind in my lavish reading sessions, which I considered nobody's business but my own. I really didn't care what anybody else thought.

And then I really moved on at some point many years later.  No more novels of any kind.  Just heavy tomes of one kind or another, imparting much wisdom about things I could have scarcely imagined when I was in my 20s.  And I love this stuff, the maps and so forth, about slavery and the world of the 17th, 18th and 16th century.  Africa, Europe, Asia.  Fiction I have pretty much left behind although I always turn to it when I am very very sad.

Generally my response to Christmas is some variation on bah humbug!  But now I have all this streaming video, access to trailers of every kind and I begun to notice that there have been many remakes of a Christmas Carol and to long to see it once again, to revisit the story of the old man who visits Christmas Past, Present and Future.  I chose a recent version (Disney 2009 with Jim Carrey) which is neatly animated with people and things which look almost real.  It was very beautiful although the look of it mattered to me less than I thought it would. The thing that struck me most was the idea that you could be someone who shunned poor people and their problems, and that in the course of a night be shown the error of your ways--as though you had never meant any harm and simply had not known better.  That the way to heaven and happiness is through good deeds and generosity.  I haven't read the novel in a long time so I can't say if this is so for Dickens, but the film seems to have little interest in the causes that resulted in Scrooge's tragic abundance of greed and lack of fun.

But I think the story is exceedingly hopeful and that, of course, it renders those who would not take part in the spirit of giving and love that is at the core of the idea of Christmas as absolutely insupportable in their mischief.  So I am won over. Was just getting ready to be quite bitter about all the money going out and nothing coming in since I am on the giving side of Christmas at 61. But I am just as grateful that I have something to part with.  And I think I will take a bit of Scrooge's lesson and simply be glad to be here and well to greet the day, rather than in the cold dark tomb, whether it is inhabited by malevolent spirits or not.