Stories I Read This Christmas

I usually read some Christmas-related stories during December. Sometimes it’s to help feel the season; sometimes simply to see how others are writing about Christmas. One year I focused on Christmas romance novellas, and I must have read 20 of them. 

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is an old standby. Last year, I read the TS Poetry edition of the 1843 work, introduced by Megan Willome. This year, I read the facsimile edition published by the Charles Dickens Museum in London. It’s about as close as you can get to the original edition without having to spend a fortune on the first edition. It includes the original illustrations by John Leech. If you want to hold and read something very close to what the readers in 1843 experienced, this is it.

 

I’ve probably read the story a dozen times, and each time I find something new, or almost new. The official title is A Christmas Carol in Prose, A Ghost Story of Christmas. And Dickens meant exactly that – it was both a carol, or song, and a ghost story. To drive home the musical point, he didn’t use the word “chapters” for the five divisions of the book but instead the word “stave.” The British meaning of “stave” is “staff,” or the five lines and four spaces between them (says the Cambridge dictionary) on which musical notes are written. Dickens was writing a song, a song that was also a ghost story.

 

The Dickens Museum edition is a joy, and it’s reasonably priced (and you can’t buy it on Amazon, unless you find a used copy somewhere). 

 

A second story I read this year was On Christmas Day. It is a longish short story jointly published by Spitalfields Life and Burley Fisher Books. The editor (and, in this case, the author) doesn’t publicly disclose his name, simply calling himself “The Gentle Author.”

 

This edition is more life a poetry pamphlet or chapbook in design. It includes two delightful woodcuts of a snowy landscape by Reynolds Stone (1909-1979). It’s a story of a young boy, an only child, traveling with his parents to visit his maternal grandmother for Christmas. His parents consider the visit something of an ordeal and are filled with a palpable dread. The grandmother is quite the character.

 

The story has echoes of Dickens, Dylan Thomas and his A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and George Mackay Brown and his Christmas Stories. I was also reminded of A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote, to add an American connection. The Gentle Author’s story is a bittersweet one, in which the last surviving descendant on both sides of the family remembers a particular Christmas. (And like the Dickens facsimile edition, this one is only available through the Spitalfields Life link.)

 

The third and final story I read was Skipping Christmas by John Grisham. I found it at the sale shop at the Kirkwood Public Library; a first edition, it was published in 2001and looks brand new. Years ago, I’d been a Grisham fan, devouring his legal thrillers like A Time to Kill, The Client, and The Pelican Brief. I didn’t know he’d written a Christmas story.

 

Skipping Christmas is something decidedly different. Luther and Nora Krank, who live on Hemlock Avenue in a suburb of any city, see their daughter off to Peru for work with the Peace Corps. Luther calculates how much they spend each year on Christmas, some $6,100, and he suggests that they skip Christmas altogether and use half of that money for a Caribbean cruise. Nora finally agrees.

 

Like all firm resolutions, skipping Christmas is easier said than done. They must contend with neighbors, stationers and other merchants, co-workers, and everyone else who has a vested personal or financial interest in Christmas. Cultural and commercial Christmas keeps intruding on their plans, and the story becomes a test to see how long they can hold out. And what the final straw might be.

 

It's a simple, intriguing story, but it lacks a sympathetic character, even a minor one. Luther is not surnamed “Krank” for nothing, and even the street name of Hemlock is not only a tree but a poison. I think I understand why the story is not well-known.

 

Do you read any stories or novels for Christmas, or have any particular favorites? 

 

Top photograph by Roberto Nickson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Weird and Wild Mind of Charles Williams – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Shane Skull: A Christmas Fairy Tale – Martin Shaw at The House of Beast & Vines.

 

A Prayer After the Moon Landing – Douglas Murray at The Free Press on the poem by W.H. Auden.

"A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens - and Megan Willome

Megan Willome has whipped up a new holiday recipe. Take a 179-year-old Christmas Classic that everyone thinks they know backward and forward. Add illustrations by an artist (Arthur Rackham) considered to have been one the leaders in the Golden Age of British Illustration. Annotate the text, but do it subtly and unobtrusively, with the notes at the end. Provide some historical background. Write a poem about the text and suggest a poetry prompt. Provide some questions for journaling or a book discussion group. 

Mix together well, and – voila! – you create A Christmas Carol: Illustrated and Annotated, With an Invitation from Author Megan Willome.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Desperation, a Speech, and a Sick Child: Dickens and “A Christmas Carol”

It was 1843. Charles Dickens was publishing Martin Chuzzlewit in serial form, and the story wasn’t doing that well, at least compared to his earlier books like Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. And Americans hated it; Dickens came close to losing his American audience for his portrayal of Americans he drew from his recent visit. His household expenses were rising, particularly with a new baby coming, and he had just learned that his usually spendthrift and almost always broke father was expecting him to pay his debts.

He needed something, something new, something to recapture the public’s imagination. 

In October, Dickens traveled to Manchester, to give a speech and to visit his beloved sister Fanny and her family. He was especially concerned about his young nephew Harry, who’d been born with a number of serious disabilities; his parents didn’t expect him to live to adulthood. Before the speech, he walked around the city, and he was horrified by the plight of poor families and how they lived. It was as bad as it was in London. His speech at the Athenaeum Club was a fiery one, full of outrage over the conditions of the poor, and was reported all over Britain.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“The Chimes” by Charles Dickens

The Chimes was the second Christmas book written by Charles Dickens, published in 1844 and followed the enormous success of A Christmas Carol the year before. In theme and story line, it is similar to A Christmas Carol, but not as tightly woven as its predecessor.

Its official title is The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In. It is the story of Trotty Veck, an old man who earns his living by running errands, delivering letter, and whatever else people may need to have done. He has a daughter, Meg, who’s in love with a young local man, Richard. Trotty stands near a church to show his availability for errands and deliveries, and he often hears the church’s bells as they peal the quarter hour (the story is divided into “quarters,” in fact).

Charles Dickens

Trotty has a good heart, but he listens a little too closely to those more well off, and comes to see poverty as the result of wickedness. So one night, he’s pulled to the bells, and discovers a whole array of goblins and other spirits, who will show him the realities he’s missing. Trotty is not a Scrooge-like character, but he has a Scrooge-like experience.

Like in A Christmas Carol, Dickens was aiming for his Victorian audience’s hearts. The poor could often get caught up in legal machinery of which they had no understanding and inevitably dealt them a bad hand. Unscrupulous and judgmental officials could and often did play a role; in fact, officialdom in the form of an alderman and a member of Parliament don’t come off very well in The Chimes.

The Chimes has many of the trademarks we associate with Dickens – vivid characters, sympathy for the poor, an interesting story – but it’s not as satisfying as some of his other Christmas books and is somewhat confusing as to why Trotty has to undergo his “dream experience” like Scrooge did. We prefer A Christmas Carol and rightly so, but we read The Chimes because it was written by a great author, not because it’s a great story.

Illustration: Trotty Veck by Kyd Clarke, from the first edition of The Chimes (1844).

‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens

It was written during a six-week period in 1843, while Charles Dickens was working on installments of Martin Chuzzlewit, which was not a success with readers. It was different that the author’s other works; it was considerably shorter, and it was not to be read in installments but published as a complete work. Dickens must have felt the pressure of the tepid response to Chuzzlewit, given the successes of The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist. Was he losing his magic touch with readers?

He was not. A Christmas Carol was a huge success. It didn’t make Dickens much money (he produced a rather elaborately illustrated and bound edition) but it solidified his reputation.

And more than that, in its own way it codified what we might call “cultural Christmas” for generations to come. It was adapted for countless plays, musicals, movies and television programs, and “Scrooge” passed into the English lexicon as a synonym for meanness and miserliness.

Rereading it today, one finds it’s lost none of its charm. The writing is vivid and expressive, almost breathless at times. The characters, even with the familiarity of a story that’s more than 170 years old, come alive in Dickens’ hands. Even having the plot of the visits by the ghost of the dead business partner and the three spirits of Christmas virtually imprinted in our cultural DNA doesn’t prevent the story from seeming fresh and new.

What Dickens could do with language and descriptions still inspires a kind of awe. Here is how the reader comes face-to-face with Ebenezer Scrooge himself:

“But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about him; he iced his coffee in the dog days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”

Charles Dickens

The spirits, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, Scrooge’s nephew, and the other characters all receive this kind of description. And even though Dickens violates the modern writing dictate of “show, don’t tell,” it doesn’t matter here, because he writes such a rousing good story that we don’t care about dictates.

Does A Christmas Carol replace the nativity story? Of course not. That was not Dickens’ intention, not it is how we read and understand the story today. But it established itself as a Christmas classic when it was published, and it remains a classic today. It is, however, a story of self-recognition, redemption and change. And a wonderful tale in the bargain.

Illustration: Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball by John Leech, from the first edition of A Christmas Carol in 1843.