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Dickens commends the spirit of remembrance, of forbearance of wrongs, and of honest embrace of what has past as the way “to think of people … as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave” and to celebrate Christmas with an open and joyful heart.

Charles Dickens’s Christmas tales are so much a part of the season that, hearing the report of Dickens’s sudden death in 1870, a girl is reported to have asked, “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”

Most famous of Dickens’s Christmas tales is A Christmas Carol, but Dickens wrote four additional Christmas novellas in the 1840s, and he featured Christmas scenes in other stories. These Christmas stories are as varied as Dickens’ characters, but so many of them share the theme of the importance of remembrance and forbearance that we might think of this as Dickens’s Christmas teaching.

Remembrance and forbearance as a Christmas teaching? That seems like a stern Christmas teaching, not merry and festive. And, the emphasis on remembrance makes Christmas a day most important for people old enough to have much to remember, not a holiday especially for children.

In his 1851 essay, "What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older," Dickens allows that there is something especially marvelous about Christmas for children:

Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.

But, Dickens writes, we need only be a little beyond childhood for Christmas to be much less cheerful and magical, for Christmas to become a day for reckoning up one’s failures and disappointments; for recalling that at some earlier Christmas we were animated by hopes of winning someone’s affections, of achieving some notable success, of gaining financial security, but now are facing the fact that these hopes have not been realized:

And is our life here, at the best, so constituted that, pausing as we advance at such a noticeable mile-stone in the track as this great birthday, we look back on the things that never were, as naturally and full as gravely as on the things that have been and are gone, or have been and still are? If it be so, and so it seems to be, must we come to the conclusion that life is little better than a dream, and little worth the loves and strivings that we crowd into it?

The birthday of the Christ child thus easily becomes not a day of joy, but a day of grim disappointment and resentment. Dickens thus diagnoses the unhappiness and stress that so many feel at Christmastime.

Dickens’s reply to this unhappiness is that the remembrance of past hopes and failures prompted by the annual return of Christmas is an opportunity for a reconciliation with our past and with those who have disappointed us. It is a time to make an honest accounting of ourselves and, in so doing, to be made whole in spirit.

Consider the case of Ebenezer Scrooge, whose rehabilitation begins with a tour of his past—a tour that becomes an apology for Scrooge’s pinched character. The very first scene Scrooge visits with the Ghost of Christmas Past is of himself as lad left to a lonesome Christmas by his mean-hearted father—a scene that immediately reduces Scrooge to sobs of grief. This and later scenes from Scrooge’s youth explain, although they do not justify, Scrooge’s hardened heart. As the tale unfolds, the remembrance of his unhappy past is crucial to the softening of Scrooge’s heart.

Dickens’s last Christmas novella, The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain, reverses A Christmas Carol: instead of a tour of memories, a ghost offers the erasure of Professor Redlaw’s painful memories—but the loss of those memories turns Redlaw into someone as miserable as Scrooge until his memories are restored to him.

Dickens commends the spirit of remembrance, of forbearance of wrongs, and of honest embrace of what has past as the way “to think of people … as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave” and to celebrate Christmas with an open and joyful heart.


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