A Christmas Carol is perennial. A century and three-quarters, and numerous stage and screen adaptations of all kinds, some better than others, have not dimmed its lustre nor diluted the central message Dickens wanted to convey, that this season of the year should be a time when, in the words of Scrooge’s nephew:
‘men and women seem to consent to open their shut-up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.’
‘Fellow-passengers to the grave’ – the macabre note is to remind the ‘haves’ not so much that they can’t take it with them, but that life is too short not to celebrate with one’s fellow human beings whoever and wherever they are situated on the ladder of comfort. (That is what Dickens means by ‘people below them’ – not below in the sense of being inferior.) The holiness of A Christmas Carol lies not just in Scrooge’s change of heart, but in its portrayal of people of all sorts and conditions celebrating the feast. The Cratchits’ Christmas is special because of the delight of the family at these annual novelties – they all exclaim that there never was such a goose, there never was such a pudding. That sense of wonder is still replicated every year at millions of Christmas tables. Hollywood Christmas films often have a child exclaiming ‘This is the best Christmas ever!’ My kids, growing up, used to say this and sometimes parodied it, but barring exceptional circumstances, every Christmas is the best Christmas ever. Or it should be – the challenge Dickens sets out for us is to make sure that everybody has a chance to celebrate Christmas. If Dickens ‘invented’ Christmas,as some people claim, he did a very good job of it.
A much less comfortable Christmas is experienced by Pip in Great Expectations. He is on tenterhooks lest his theft of a pork-pie to feed the convict be discovered, and all through Christmas dinner his terrifying sister who brought him up ‘by hand’, Mrs Joe, Uncle Pumblechook and the dreary Wopsles make pointed comments about youth in general being ‘naterally wicious’. Just as dinner is drawing to a close, a sergeant and soldiers arrive, looking for the blacksmith’s help in a job of work to do with an escaped convict. Joe, at his trade, throws off the browbeaten husband persona enough to defy his wife and take Pip and Mr Wopsle on a walk across the marshes with the soldiers to search for the missing convict.The convict is caught, but so that Pip won’t get into trouble on his account, as he’s warming himself at the guard-room fire before being taken back to the prison-hulk, he confesses to having stolen the pork-pie from the blacksmith’s house, and Joe says
‘God knows you’re welcome to it…..We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creature – Would us, Pip?’
Joe’s generosity shows the true Christmas spirit; the example of his goodness then and at all times(‘Would us, Pip?’) acts as a check to Pip’s worst instincts throughout the book.
Michael Moran in 1950s north Roscommon is, like Mrs Joe, a domestic tyrant, but he softens a bit for the festive season in John McGahern’s Amongst Women. He, his second wife Rose and Moran’s three daughters and son all crush into the car to go to Midnight Mass:
The church itself was crowded and humming with excitement. There were many others like the Moran girls who had come home for Christmas. They would all be singled out as they came away from the altar rail after Communion and discussed over hundreds of dinners the next day: who was home and where they were living and what they worked at and how they looked and who they got their looks from and what they wore….As good-looking girls in their first flowering, the three Morans were among the stars of the Communion rail that Christmas night.
Their Christmas dinner next day consists of turkey – not goose, interestingly; most country people had goose then, and it is surprising that Moran didn’t insist on it as the less ‘showy’ option. There is no mention of ham, but they have stuffing and roast potatoes and brown lemonade squirted out of glass bottles with syphons. The day winds down with card-playing and everybody goes to bed with relief, because Moran’s mood is fragile and the least thing could tip him over into cold anger. No visits are made or received on that day but Stephen’s Day, with the Wren Boys arriving on the Arigna coal lorry, and the dance in the evening, makes up for it.
The tradition that nobody should visit on Christmas Day is violated in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, set in Edwardian London. ‘We never had a better Christmas up till four o’clock’, Rose, the narrator, aged around 12, tells us. And it is a good Christmas; the family, including their servant Kate, exchange beautiful and useful gifts, the children go to church with their father through a scene that seems ‘peopled with marionettes’,so transformed is everything on that special morning – as it often seems to be, at Christmas, and not just for children. For dinner – in the middle of the day and called dinner, not lunch – they have turkey and ham, and sausage and chestnut stuffing, and the Christmas puddings are fine, much to Mamma’s relief, because she only made them in October. Afterwards they have almonds, and raisins and tangerines and Carlsbad plums, and Kate’s brother, a sailor, who is eating Christmas dinner with her in the kitchen, is invited to come up and drink a glass of port with Papa. The shock of four o’clock is the arrival of Cordelia’s infatuated violin teacher, Miss Beevor, at the house to preside over a violin recital that Cordelia is to give them. And she plays really badly, spoiling everybody’s Christmas. But their Christmas is already almost at breaking-point. Papa has left off his philandering and financial speculation temporarily because it amuses him to make Christmas presents for the family and to play with the children, not because of any sense of family duty. Mamma has barely managed to pull a Christmas together; even the turkey and ham have been sent by Papa’s relations in Ireland. Over dinner, the parents have sharp words that even the children notice. So Miss Beevor is the least of Mamma’s problems but the children think, or choose to think, that she is the worst. That is the genius of the writing.
I can’t leave Christmas in literature without discussing ‘The Dead’, James Joyce’s short story which means so many different things to so many different people. Every time I read it I find something new in it. Some critics despise Gabriel Conroy but I like him; he is a conscientious nephew in a family short on males, doing the right thing by his aunts and his female cousin, and I find his speech at the dinner about the Three Graces quite moving. The Michael Furey story at the end is moving in a different way, but one doesn’t have to dislike Gabriel or Gabriel’s world to appreciate it. Neither person nor setting is more ‘valuable’ or ‘authentic’ than the other.
But as somebody who has been putting on a Christmas for 35 years and counting, it is, at this stage, the details of the Morkans’ Epiphany feast which intrigue me most:
A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table, and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill around its shin, and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large greenleaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle , on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks.
This way of serving a meal, by putting all the dishes for all the courses out at once, was old-fashioned even at that time. (There is also a pudding in a huge yellow dish on the closed piano which serves as a temporary sideboard, a very realistic touch.) Gabriel carves and hands around plates of meat and Lily, the servant, goes around with potatoes, helped by Aunt Kate. When everyone has finished their main course the sweet dishes are passed around and then the plates are cleared and the pudding is served. And who has prepared all of this? Not Lily on her own, certainly – only a teenager, she wouldn’t have the expertise for the cooking. All four women have slaved over this meal all day and probably the previous day too. They have roasted or boiled three joints of meat, prepared custards and puddings and jellies and blancmanges, and cleaned and stoned the dried fruit. They have laid the table and polished the cutlery and the glasses and ironed the napkins and last of all, as the guests are arriving and Lily is taking their coats and the music and dancing is being set up, they have managed to boil the potatoes and keep them warm. The clearing-up will take another day. That’s a ‘reading’ of ‘The Dead’ you don’t often see in Joycean criticism.
Neither toil, nor tension, nor even domestic tyranny, however, can extinguish the joy and wonder of the feast
Happy Christmas!
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
—————————–Great Expectations (1861).
John McGahern, Amongst Women (London: Faber 1990)
Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (London: Macmillan 1957)
James Joyce, Dubliners (1914).
Clear Classic Books 
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