The Weekly Screed (#889)

“…Darkness is cheap, 

and Scrooge liked it…”

by David Benjamin

“… If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart…’…”

                                           — Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

PARIS — The “spirit of Christmas” isn’t just a needlepoint sampler or a seasonal blurb. It’s a philosophy of life. This dawned on me when I was still a kid, discovering on TV the 1938 Reginald Owen version of A Christmas Carol. The words of Ebenezer Scrooge’s nephew Fred capture that philosophy.

“I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys…”

This burst of oratory comes before Scrooge’s haunted journey through Christmas Past and Christmas Yet to Come, on route to emergence from his cocoon of callous and miserly greed. Dickens’ story implies the salvation for all mankind promised in the nativity of the holiday’s namesake, but the subtlety of that theme — Dickens never once drops the name of Jesus — lends to A Christmas Carol a sense of the universal. Dickens fashions from Luke’s lyric a secular parable and a moral creed.

Watching the film version at an impressionable age turned me into a maven of Christmas stories and movies. I came to prefer Alastair Sim’s 1951 portrayal of Scrooge over Reginald Owen’s, partly because it’s truer to the Dickens script and partly because — also true to Dickens — Sim’s character is darker, meaner and bitterer than any other Scrooge, before and after.

 

Fear, you see, is the secret ingredient. Inept Christmas stories — they’re everywhere this time of year — drip with sentimentality and sicken with sugarplums. Dickens’ Carol is barely more sentimental than a Raymond Chandler novel. He drags Ebenezer Scrooge — and us with him — through the choleric London slums and holds up the skull-faces of Want and Ignorance. He takes us straight to the doors of Death before giving Scrooge a break. The Dickens Rule is that you can’t do Christmas without suspense. You need an air of menace.

Fear, greed and suspense are, for example, the elements that lurk within A Christmas Story, the now classic Bob Clark film based on Jean Shepherd’s BB-gun saga, “Duel on the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid.” Shepherd’s screenplay achieves the Dickensian balance of dark night — the terrifying department-store Santa Claus snarling, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!” — and morning light essential to a Christmas tale that doesn’t cloy.

 

Of course, the best Christmas flick of all is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. The scenes in which George Bailey staggers through a Hobbesian hell with Clarence the angel are a chilling exercise in black-and-white bleakness. In the same sequence, Donna Reed gives one of the scariest Christmas-movie performances ever filmed. Stripped of makeup and bereft of her soft-focus lens, fleeing in terror from her other-life husband, she becomes the stark, staring epitome of barren spinsterhood. Without the counterpoint of George Bailey’s lifelong discontent, culminating in Clarence’s horror show, the tearful, cheerful climax of Capra’s film would collapse beneath a crushing load of feel-too-good shmaltz and Zuzu’s petals.

In It’s a Wonderful Life, echoing Dickens, there is more than message. There is an ideal for a human community that amends the Golden Rule. The spirit of Christmas, as expressed by Dickens and embodied by a Scrooge who, in the end, was “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew,” is a sort of Golden Rule 2.0:

“Do unto others more and better than you would ever expect anyone else to do unto you.”

Dickens’ fable reflects the higher standard of love, compassion and selflessness that the infant Christchild would eventually preach when he set forth on his grim journey to the ultimate sacrifice. 

However, there’s a rub here. The fatal — or perhaps merely tragic — flaw in all of our best-loved Christmas fiction, from Dickens to the Grinch, is the problem of probability. Scrooge, after all, is not moved to mend his rotten ways by the slightest measure of self-examination, nor by the supplications of his loving nephew Fred, nor by any living person. He only sees his malignancy after being visited, frightened, berated, browbeaten and transported through a Time Machine by a platoon of pushy ghosts.

 

George Bailey only escapes despair and death through an angel’s intercession.

 

In real life, with ghosts and angels hard to come by, the mere prospect of December 25th does little to melt the gilded hearts of the incorrigible. We need only regard the Oval Office, where now resides the closest facsimile of Ebenezer Scrooge we’ve ever encountered — greedy and cheap, selfish and suspicious, incurious, uncouth and seething with anger. Holed up against the world, he counts his coin and stuffs his purse. He shouts “Humbug!” at every word that does not please. He perceives no people below him. Squint though he might, he sees no “vacant seat in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved…”

Our contemporary Scrooge bellows his defiant “Merry Christmas,“ without merriment or meaning. He raises it, rather, as battle cry against a nebulous army of fancied foes and faithless mongrels who blaspheme against his name. He won’t be enlightened and redeemed, either by Clarence or a King of the Jews in swaddling clothes. He is a Scrooge without self-examination, without doubt, without remorse or repentance, without Marley to fear or Tiny Tim to save, without even the prize Turkey in the poulterer’s window.

 In a non-fiction world, absent humility and generosity, without wisdom or wit, without grace and the hope of redemption, Christmas isn’t much better than a BB in the eye.