The Man Who Invented Christmas (19 page)

In
A Christmas Carol,
the chief focus of the reader’s sympathy becomes the crippled Tiny Tim, rather than a Christ child. When Scrooge is treated to a vision of a world in which
that
child has died, readers instinctively understand that the most important question for the remainder of the narrative concerns just how an earthly child might be saved.

The portrayal of Tiny Tim—derived from Dickens’s memories of his sickly younger brother, whom he called “Tiny Fred”—has proved “real” enough to prompt modern-day physicians to puzzle over the exact nature of the fictional child’s affliction. One researcher suggests that Tiny Tim suffered from a kidney disease known today as renal tubular acidosis, a condition that can retard growth and weaken bones. In 1844, had the child been presented for care, doctors might not have used that name, but they would have recognized his symptoms and would have had effective dietary methods of treatment at hand.

More likely, however, Tiny Tim and Tiny Fred suffered from rickets, a common affliction of that time in cities where smog frequently blocked sunlight, the natural source of vitamin D. In the days before vitamin supplements, children were particularly susceptible to the disease, which leads to loss of bone density, muscle weakness, and osteoporosis. Such symptoms could have been reversed by an improvement in diet, which the Cratchit family would have enjoyed once Scrooge gave his clerk a raise.

Medical diagnosis aside, the sanctification of the family found in
A Christmas Carol
would become one of the chief tenets of Victorian thinking, and it is one reason for the virtual deification of Dickens by some intellectuals of the time. Inspired by the secular humanism he so admired in Dickens’s work, the Jewish writer Benjamin Farjeon authored some sixty novels between 1866 and 1904, including a number of Christmas tales in a similar vein, and earning high praise from the British press that described him as “a preacher of the brotherhood of rich and poor, more powerful, graphic, and tender than any since Dickens.” Today as well, there are Jewish families who, in the Farjeon manner of thinking and with no affinity whatsoever toward the Christian underpinnings of the holiday, might still put up a “Chanukah Bush” for a season devoted to togetherness and love.

At the same time that Dickens was writing
A Christmas Carol,
intellectual forces were gathering that would strike a series of mighty blows at traditional religious thought. The publication of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
was only sixteen years away, and while the world would have to wait a bit to hear from Freud, it would not be long before the vision of man as an exalted creature, descended from a holy spark and only six days in the making, would be replaced by one of him as a dust mote in history’s whirl, or slithered up from prehistoric ooze, possessing not an iota of the divine, his consciousness formed by the accident of stimulus and response, and his fate at the mercy of a universe indifferent to his presence.

Given the batterings of modern scientific thought on the ordinary psyche, Dickens’s version of the Gospels offers something of a comforting compromise, and they did so not only for his contemporaries but for modern readers as well. There are no “holy” ghosts in
A Christmas Carol,
but the secular apparitions that appear offer a comforting counterpoint to the reader in need of some compass by which to set his moral bearings in an age of upheaval. If there is a deeper reason why Dickens’s tale survives, beyond its obvious delights, then that honorable intention is as good as any.

W
hatever the moral underpinnings of its appeal, Dickens’s story has had a lasting practical impact on our culture well beyond the ubiquitous yearly dramatizations. The name of Scrooge has entered our vocabulary as one of the more colorful synonyms for “miser” (
scrooge
was a verb used in Dickens’s day, meaning “to squeeze, or crush” and derived from the Old English
scruze
); and “Bah! Humbug!” has become a favorite rejoinder to any declaration that strikes a listener as ridiculous or overly sentimental. Furthermore, when Scrooge dispatched a street urchin to buy that prize turkey for the Cratchit family (the
big
prize turkey, not the little one, mind you), it had a profound impact upon the British economy, one that has trickled down to that of the United States as well:

“Go and buy it, and tell ’em to bring it here, that I may give them the direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and I’ll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes, and I’ll give you half-a-crown.”

The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.

“I’ll send it to Bob Cratchit’s!” whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. “He shan’t know who sends it. It’s twice the size of Tiny Tim….”

The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down stairs to open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer’s man….

“—Here’s the Turkey. Hallo. Whoop. How are you? Merry Christmas.”

It
was
a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ’em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.

“Why, it’s impossible to carry that to Camden Town,” said Scrooge. “You must have a cab.”

The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried.

Prior to this small moment at the end of Dickens’s tale, the traditional bird for the well-provisioned Christmas table in England was the goose, and the impact of
A Christmas Carol
was said to have sent the nation’s goose-raising industry to near ruin. By 1868 the authoritative voice of Isabella Beeton, in
Mrs. Beeton’s Every Day Cookery and Housekeeping Book,
was assuring readers,

A noble dish is a turkey, roast or boiled. A Christmas dinner, with the middle-class of this empire, would scarcely be a Christmas dinner without its turkey; and we can hardly imagine an object of greater envy than that presented by a respected portly paterfamilias carving, at the season devoted to good cheer and genial charity, his own fat turkey, and carving it well.

In the United States, wild turkeys were always abundant, and the creatures found their way, along with geese, to early American holiday tables. Today, however, geese are generally left alone, while some 270 million turkeys annually are raised and carried to market, about one-quarter of them during the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Perhaps in the tradition of a reborn Scrooge, the bounty of an American host is often expressed in terms of the height of his Christmas tree and by the size of the bird trundled home from the local market.

Many of the decorative elements and amusements mentioned in
A Christmas Carol
at the Fezziwig party and elsewhere were not so much Dickens’s inventions as traditional elements given a fresh gloss by their appearance in such splendid literary surroundings: blazing fireplaces, mince pies and wassail bowls, carol-singing, plum puddings, holly sprigs, mistletoe, fiddling and dancing, blind-man bluffings, and the parlor game of forfeits had been seen in holiday festivities previously, but the effect of Dickens’s tale was to make the incorporation of such elements seem obligatory for anyone’s proper Christmas.

Incidentally, it is interesting to mention—for those who are tempted to lay blame for the contemporary orgy of gift-giving at Dickens’s doorstep—something that is
not
in the book: for all its emphasis on the concept of charity, no gifts or gaily wrapped presents appear in
A Christmas Carol.
Aside from that magnanimous gesture of Scrooge’s to Bob Cratchit at the story’s close, the most valuable gifts exchanged between its characters are those of love and goodwill.

There are other customs associated with Dickens and the Victorian Christmas. The first commercially printed Christmas card, for instance, appeared in that same holiday season in which
A Christmas Carol
was published, the work of Sir Henry Cole and John C. Horsely. It was not unusual for the aristocracy of the period to include season’s greetings in personal correspondence or on calling cards. Queen Victoria sent a letter to Lord Melbourne in 1841, its paper “adorned with many quaint and humorous Christmas devices,” and, gentleman that he was, Melbourne wrote back at once to offer, “most sincerely and most fervently, the good wishes of the Season.”

But as to the Christmas card itself, the story is generally told that in 1843, Cole, a noted civil servant and industrial designer credited with the design of the first postage stamp, found himself strapped for time as the holidays approached. To speed the task of sending out all those personal greetings, then, he employed his friend, the artist J. C. Horsley, to produce 1,000 lithographed images on cardboard stock.

The card depicts a family of distinctly Fezziwiggian mien, raising a toast above a banner wishing “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” to the card’s recipients. And while the image of adults and children alike tossing back goblets of wine drew some criticism from the nation’s temperance leaders, Horsley also added side panels that depicted the charitable acts of feeding and clothing the unfortunate—in all a most
Carol-
like diorama.

Sir Henry’s idea caught on quickly in England, though it would take more than thirty years for the practice to find its way to the United States. In 1875 a Boston printer, Louis Prang, a native of Germany, began publishing such cards, earning for himself the sobriquet of “father of the American Christmas card.” Prang found the going difficult, though—his elaborate creations proved too pricey for the American market, and by the early 1890s he was bankrupt, forced out of business by competitors hawking their wares for a penny apiece. From that point, the industry caught fire, and today it is estimated that more than one billion Christmas cards are sold each year in Britain and the United States.

It is likewise difficult to imagine a true Victorian Christmas without a Christmas tree, though no such object appears in either the text or the illustrations of
A Christmas Carol.
Certainly Dickens was fond of the icon, however. In 1850 he would write a sketch celebrating his childhood memories of such trees, a piece that became one of his most popular. Prince Albert may have increased the English affection for the German custom (where mythology equated the fir tree with the tree of life from the Gospels, and transformed it into a symbol for the birth of Christ) when he married Queen Victoria, but, as Dickens’s sketch makes clear, the practice of putting up a Christmas tree was established well before that 1840 royal wedding. Court historians describe the work of Charlotte, wife of George III, in decorating and lighting evergreen trees as part of Christmas festivities during the 1780s and 1790s. And Victoria herself wrote of fond childhood memories of a season in 1833, including “trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments.”

Like Dickens, both Victoria and Albert were great boosters of the season, and their practice of erecting a tree at Windsor Castle each year following their 1840 marriage greatly popularized the practice. In 1848 the
Illustrated London News
printed an engraving of the royal family gathered around a decorated tree beneath which lay a number of presents. The tree itself was described in breathless terms by the rival
Times:
“On each branch are arranged a dozen wax tapers. Pendant from the branches are elegant trays, baskets, and bonbonniers, and other placements for sweetmeats of the most varied kind, and all forms, colours, and degree of beauty.” By the following year, the
News
and other publications were running features and seasonal supplements advising readers on such topics as tree decoration, gift-wrapping, Christmas party planning, and the proper placement of mistletoe, holly, and ivy.

Copies of the
News
engraving, retouched somewhat to remove the queen’s offending tiara, were reprinted in U.S. publications, including
Godey’s Lady Book
in 1850, but the practice of putting up a tree was not unknown in the New World. Though some say German troops brought the Christmas tree to the United States (Washington supposedly was able to cross the Delaware in 1776 because the Hessians were preoccupied with their Christmas celebrations), it is an undocumented claim. The first recorded appearance of the Christmas tree was made by a visitor to the Pennsylvania Dutch country near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the early 1800s, and the practice picked up following the 1838 publication of a travel pamphlet describing the quaint custom being practiced on the Pennsylvania frontier.