A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Nov 15th, 2007 by Bethany
It's time again for one of my very favorite holiday traditions: reading A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. I read it at least once every year, sometimes more than once, and I can hardly think of anything else that brings the holiday spirit into my life and mood more, except perhaps less prosey and more musical Christmas carols. I recommend that you read or listen to an audio recording of an unabridged version of the book if you possibly can. On amazon.com you can get a copy for as little as $1, or you can buy the fancy, but useful, annotated (code for "little notes on the side that explain the archaic English") version my dad used to read to us from, or you can go to your handy-dandy library and borrow it for free.
Now, to get the most out of A Christmas Carol you need to read it aloud. There are all sorts of sounds in the words that lend to the descriptions that you just won't get the effect of it you read silently. For example, try reading the following quote silently, then aloud, and see if you get a better feeling for what the author and I are trying to say:
Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone. Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!
See what I mean? That's the way the entire story is–it's very auditory.
The book is quite short. The version in my hands right now is about 125 pages long (it has pictures, too!) and the $1 version I linked to above was only 60 pages long. So, if you start reading around mid- or late-November, it's very easy to get to the end by Christmas even with all the holiday busy-ness of the season if you read a bit every day. There's a pleasant suspense to reading the story that way, as my dad read it to our family when I was little–he'd read a bit to us every night after family prayer and we would always beg him to read more if we were awake enough when he shut the book for the night.
For those of you unfortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the story, A Christmas Carol is a ghost story of Christmas in prose, as the subtitle tells us. The main character is a man named Scrooge who is about as nasty and Grinchy as they come and who popularized the phrase "Bah! Humbug!" To his great chagrin, he is visted by four ghosts in the course of a Christmas Eve. These ghosts' business is to teach him to love Christmas and to get him to repent of his meanness by showing him who he was, is, and who he may become. Despite the spookiness inherent in the subject of ghosts, there is a lightness and a humorous tone in the story that I haven't seen in many of Dickens' other works.
Aside from the power of the story itself to create goodwill, I find a lot of pleasure in hearing the descriptions of various Christmas celebrations. I love hearing about the ball thrown by Scrooge's old employer, Fezziwig, and how Mrs. Fezziwig "was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher and I'll use it." The description of the Second Spirit's appearance and the long lists Christmassy foods like
"…turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.."
in contrast to the Cratchit family's "display of glass" that consisted of "two tumblers, and a custard cup without a handle."
Get out your books and start reading aloud, to yourself or your family, and make it a tradition that will help you smile and appreciate what you have.