Ebenezer Scrooge and Emmanuel

I don’t always feel enthusiastic about Christmas. I confess, I am positively Puritanical about it, at times. Never quite as bad as Ebenezer Scrooge, although Christmas crackers and their “jokes” do leave me rather cold. Sometimes the commercialisation also rubs me the wrong way.

I have been reading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to my children in the lead up to Christmas. Dickens’ tale, which has been ably expounded upon in the pages of this publication of late, is one of personal redemption and transformation. A Christmas Carol poses as a ghost story, but the ghosts are benevolent, warning Ebenezer Scrooge of his fate should he continue down the path  he is on.

In a famous scene where the family of Scrooge’s clerk, the Cratchits, enjoy a Christmas feast together, the feeble and ill Tiny Tim talks of his time at church that morning. Tim says that he is pleased to join the throng in worshipping the Christ-child because his crippled self might remind everyone that the Christ is the one who healed the suffering and sick.

It seems to me that Dickens brings together two important aspects of Christmas in this scene. On the one hand, there is the personal – the focus on family, the joy of fellowship, reconciliation, returning home, and the delight in good things. The Cratchits have, in relative terms, a humble feast. But they all gush and gasp over each aspect of the experience, and laud Mrs Cratchit’s achievement in the kitchen.

They also delight in being together. Christmas reminds us, whether we are rich in family and fellowship or on our lonesome, that we are social creatures, made for being with others. Dickens contrasts Scrooge’s social isolation with those of his ex-fiancé and the Cratchits, illustrating the simple consolations of family life. A similar message is embedded in the exuberant commercial activity of the grocers and their customers. Even though the exchanges are economic, Dickens depicts them as social.

Christmas is also a reminder to the most Scrooge-like of us that we are more than social creatures; we are also spiritual. It is no mere technique nor arbitrary genre-choice on Dickens’ part that Scrooge is visited by ghosts. Christmas is a spiritual time, even for those of us who are not observant believers. Scrooge is visited by ghosts at Christmas, and so we are, too.

The ghost who visits us today is not the ghost of Christmas Past, or some similar “spirit,” as Scrooge calls them. The ghost we receive is a different spirit altogether. It is the ghost of Christianity. The West remains haunted by Jesus of Nazareth in many ways, even while religious observance is plummeting.

Advent reminds everyone that we are waiting for a saviour even if we don’t believe in the imminent arrival of a heavenly Messiah. Christmas reminds us that we all still believe in magic, that we are still spiritual even in the face of unbelief. We somehow believe that the story of the Divine taking on human flesh, as a baby no less, has meaning for us.

Why else do we continue to watch It’s a Wonderful Life and The Sound of Music at this time of year? Is it not because they evoke in us a sense of the magic of the season? Children and adults in my household have profited from watching the excellent animated film Klaus for this reason. The evocative carols service at Kings College, Cambridge, also moves our spiritual side, jogging our Anglophone cultural memory as well as our religious sentiments.

By contrast, Dr Suess’s Grinch evokes mockery for trying to steal Christmas, and rightly so. What he is doing is impossible. You can’t really steal magic. Like the Grinch, Ebenezer Scrooge cannot avoid the magic of Christmas, even if the magic he discovers is of a deeper, more complex form one, designed to move him to repentance.

The other book I have been reading with my household is the Bible. Each of the Gospels has a Christmas narrative. Even the book of Revelation does. In Chapter 12 of the Apocalypse, a woman gives birth to a child and a dragon waits to consume the baby immediately. This is a dark, cosmic Christmas, one that is mirrored in the gospels by the Herodian attempt to murder the Christ-child.

The richest Christmas narrative is found in the Gospel of Luke. The Doctor recounts Zechariah’s and Mary’s mysterious angelic visitations, both of which preempt strange pregnancies that herald the coming of a Saviour. That Saviour is a baby. How can this be? The shepherds are told that he is “born of David’s line,” as the hymn puts it. In Bethlehem, the shepherds find a baby Davidic king, born into Roman-occupied territory, born of a virgin, promising Israel liberation from her enemies.

The promise of liberation from enemies is not just for Israel, though. It is for all of us. Jesus of Nazareth is no mere political saviour–he is God in human form. He can do more than save us from our earthly enemies; he promises to save us from ourselves. Hence, the Incarnation, God becoming flesh, is the most magical event of all.

The Incarnation is, in a way, impossibly magical. Yet, with that impossibility comes the possibility of real salvation. In the Incarnation, we find a God who becomes one of us, who joins us and fellowships with us, in order that he might save us.

Is that how these two elements of Dickens’ Christmas Carol join together? The Dickensian Christmas, as told in the Carol, is redemptive. Scrooge finds himself transformed, almost unrecognizably, upon realizing his extreme deficiencies. He moves from cursing Christmas to welcoming it, from grim penny-pinching to lavish generosity.

Scrooge is magically transformed, just as the scriptures depict a world transformed by the coming of the God-man Jesus. When I think hard about the latter I am less puritanical at Christmastime. I am thankful for Christmas, for family, and for friends. Yes, the Christmas crackers, the “jokes”, and the uncouth commerce bring out the worst in me. But then I consider the babe in the feeding trough and can’t help but wonder.

Simon Kennedy is an Associate Editor at Quadrant. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Danube Institute