The Man Who Changed Christmas.
By the early nineteenth century, Christmas was no longer a festive event in the lives of many people. In Britain, it had still not recovered from its banning by the Puritans, an edict long since revoked but still lingering in it’s somber effects. Christmas was a one-day holiday, generally regarded as a time for quiet pursuits. In many American homes too, it was a solemn feast, with ought to much sign of its current jollity and show of benevolence.
So why do we celebrate with such gusto today? It may be a cynical view, but it is often said that Charles Dickens invented our modern Christmas. That is an exaggeration, but it is true that the novelist gave new life to a festival that seemed to be fading away.
In 1843, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, the first of a series of annual Christmas books that were aimed, he said ‘to awaken loving and fore bearing thoughts’ In his stories, Dickens combined a rousing celebration of the old merry making Christmas with the idea of Christmas as an occasion that united families in a sprit of charity and love. He depicted Christmas as being warm and cozy for some and miserably cold and hungry for others. Constantly troubled by the poverty, injustice and divisions in society, he saw his Christmas stories as a means of brining the depressed working classes out of the cold and into the warm embrace of the nation.
His public readings, which he first gave in 1853, attracted enthusiastic audiences. In Birmingham, 2000 working people, admitted at a reduced price at his request, cheered a three-hour reading of A Christmas Carol, interpreting it as the work of a man who understood and spoke out for them. When Queen Victoria, too, asked to hear Dickens read the story of Scrooge and Tiny Tim, it seemed that the nation was truly united in a sprit of goodwill.
Internationally, Dickens’s stories were just as successful. A Christmas Carol is said to have had such an influence on one American factory owner the he added a day to his worker’s holiday.
Dickens is said to have fashioned not only the style of our modern Christmas but the myth – in Britain, if not else ware – that the typical Christmas is white. Climatologists say that Dickens’s childhood there were eight white Christmases in a row, which undoubtedly influenced the way the he, followed by millions of Christmas cards, portrayed the British Christmas. But only two or three times this century has snow fallen ‘deep and crisp and even’ over most of Britain on Christmas Day.