A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Dickens understood that at heart Christmas is a secular festival, a midwinter feast adopted and adapted by Christianity. The Christian elements in A Christmas Carol are peripheral.  What he is really celebrating is a pagan pig out, mixed with great dollops of mawkish sentimentality. There are worse things in this world.  
British culture has since the 17th Century been a battleground between the puritan and cavalier. The Puritans won the civil war but the victory was short lived and it was cavalier culture that dominated the restoration. The puritan spirit had to wait for the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution to once again dominate British culture, this time in the shape of the Protestant Work Ethic. Thrift, hard work and a suspicion of pleasure was extolled from pulpit and pamphlet,[1] virtue being its own reward, rest confined to the afterlife, hard work was the great virtue, laziness the great vice.  
Scrooge now seems a caricature, but the views he held were commonplace in the mid years of Victoria’s reign and indeed you do not need to strain too hard to hear the echoes of such views being expressed in parliament today. In celebrating Christmas Dickens was drawing attention to the fact that there were other values, friendship, family, the need to express the human spirit with music, dancing, fire, bright lights and laughter; whether consciously or not he was calling for a return to more pagan values, to the joy to be found in bacchanalia and excess.[2] The ghost of Christmas past is the ghost of the pagan winter festival that the Christians usurped.
The Christian hold over the mid winter festival has never been wholly secure, so from the introduction of the Christmas tree and garlands of holly and ivy the pagan spirit has been fighting back.

My Christmas wish to all who read this is, if you can, to drink, be idle, eat to excess, in short ‘pig-out.’ Let the words of William Blake ring in your ears.

        ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’

And, if you can, have a happy Christmas/Winter Festival.



[1] This being preached primarily to the working classes, their ‘betters’ never wholly loosing sight of the benefits of excess.
[2] I am conscious of the dangers of over romanticizing paganism in the way the so called ‘new age’ movement has tended to do. To say that paganism had a dark side teeters on the edge of becoming a pythonesque joke.   Having visited this page I would be grateful for your feedback, either tick one of the boxes below or make a comment via the comments button.

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