What the Dickens?

I’ve written in this space of my general disdain for the season and the holiday itself. My kids call me the Grinch. But I’m trying. I bought outdoor Christmas lights this year despite the intense existential pain that caused.

But even I, disparager of all things Xmas, have a soft spot for some of the classic holiday movies. The Grinch Who Stole Christmasis probably my favourite, although the first half is the most enjoyable. Rudolph is perhaps the lamest cartoon of all time (sorry, not sorry) but I find A Christmas Story pretty funny. And I love the many different versions of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.

I’ll reluctantly admit to getting a lump in my throat when we find out in the story Tiny Tim is going to get medical help. It’s amazing emotional manipulation from a master wordsmith that uses premonitions of death, themes of vulnerability, innocence, change and redemption. And the last line of the piece, Tiny Tim’s ‘God bless us, every one’ sure pulls at the heartstrings.

But recent world events have made me remember that Dicken’s intent in writing the piece was not Christmas sentimentality. As Victoria Addis comments in ‘The Radical Politics of A Christmas Carol’ Dickens was trying to “to communicate a radical political message, and to do so in a form that would help to effect real change.”

It was a parliamentary report in 1843 on child labour that got Dickens thinking. The descriptions of the appalling conditions of child labour at the time motivated him to write something that would “strike the heaviest blow in [his] power.” Dickens is quoted as saying he wanted his story to come down “with a sledgehammer force” to make the fortunate think of the less fortunate.

This isn’t some nice, warm and fuzzy Christmas tale. This is a writer going after the rich, and the quiet bystanders who allowed systems of injustice to exist. His attack against the idea that the poor were “‘idle’ was an attack against the status quo of the time.

I know, we are not in Victorian England. But since 2021, 30 U.S. states have weakened child labour laws. And anyone who thinks we are immune to the fascist insanity south of our border might also think that their Christmas presents were made by elves.

And we are about to have the world’s first trillionaire; an idea so grotesque that it defies description. So we may not live in Victorian conditions, we are heading more in that direction than the opposite. Dicken’s pleas are sadly more relevant today than when I first heard the story.

I think it’s time to put ‘the Dickens’ back in Christmas. I think it’s time to fight the good fight, just as he did all of those years ago.

Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays from my family to yours.