No More Work Tonight

At around three o’clock on Christmas Eve afternoon, my father would lead my brothers and me into the living room, motion us onto the sofa or a place on the floor, pour himself a glass of wine, settle into the armchair next to the fireplace and start reading Charles Dicken’s, A Christmas Carol—all three ghosts of it and not any of the abridged versions. It was light outside when he began and dark outside when he finished. Along the way, my mother, knocking around the kitchen, would bring us eggnog and require us to pause for dinner. We would fetch pillows, change places, lie on our backs, flip to our stomachs, change again, ask for more dessert, stare into the eyes of the dog. But we remained in the audience. At the same point in the story every year—the end of Bob Cratchit’s eulogy for Tiny Tim—my father would start crying while reading, “I am very happy . . . I am very happy.”

“I know, my dears, that when we recollect how patient and how mild he was although he was a little, little child we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it.”

“No, never, father!” they all cried again.

“I am very happy,” said little Bob, “I am very happy!”

I tried to carry on this tradition with my children, but each side was overwhelmed by the commitment. My copy of A Christmas Carol extends to two hundred pages. It is ambitious bedtime reading. I stepped down to an abridged recording of the story narrated by Paul Scofield that lasts about one hour. We relied on that for years until the children were out of the house. I have an unabridged version, also narrated by Scofield, that I will listen to today as I take my turn knocking around the kitchen. I have things I have to do ahead of the celebration tomorrow. I can listen. It is especially comforting to me that way.

Where do images in your life take you? When the Christmas Carol narrative reaches the tremulous sounds of Marley’s ghost ascending from below, I will be transported to our old house in Westport, Connecticut, built sometime in the seventeen hundreds, with an imposing front door knocker, wide, creaking floorboards and a fireplace in nearly every room. I will be in my room as a young boy, in the bed nearest the door. Marley will come up those stairs:

“The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.”

“The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.”

My oldest grandchild is nine. It is getting near the time to draw him into our traditions. Those have to be blended with the customs of his father, our marvelous son-in-law, which I do not believe include, A Christmas Carol. It is only required, from our end, that a version dutiful to the text reaches him before the Muppets movie. But nothing—Muppets or Albert Finney—has ever managed to capture Dickens apart from Dickens:

“. . . 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, shrivelled 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 with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”

For Christmas, I want to be able to write like that: solitary as an oyster, carrying my own low temperature about me.

Christmas was not the extravagance in nineteenth-century England or America that it has become. The German custom of a Christmas tree was just beginning to find its way into homes elsewhere in the world. Charles Dickens invented the Christmas familiar to us with his story. A prophet of sorts, shaped by his experiences as a boy working in the squalid conditions of a shoe factory while his father did time in debtor’s prison, conditioned by his careful observations of the yawning gulf between rich and poor at that time in England.

“What’s to-day!” cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.

“Eh?” returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.

“What’s to-day, my fine fellow?” said Scrooge.

“To-day!” replied the boy. “Why, CHRISTMAS DAY.”

“It’s Christmas Day!” said Scrooge to himself. “I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. ”

We will attend church tonight. Many Protestant churches have been throwing in the towel on Christmas Day services; it is not possible to compete with the excitement of what is under the tree and the subsequent push to gather up the boxes, paper, and ribbon ahead of more family for lunch. I am okay with that, making way for families and friends gathering together. In the church where we celebrate, we will bring presents for the collection—socks, warm sweaters, gloves— in a small effort to share something with those who have much less.  Tomorrow is reserved for other aspects of our celebration, including roast beef, creamed onions and, of course, plum pudding, the one time of year that we set dessert on fire to the delight of children at the table.

“Heaped up upon the floor, to form a kind of throne, were 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.”

May your holiday chambers be filled with the warmth of family and friends, of “seething bowls of punch,” good memories and joyful hope for the coming year.

Merry Christmas.

“Yo ho, my boys!” said Fezziwig. “No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let’s have the shutters up,” cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, “before a man can say, Jack Robinson!”