A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is perhaps the quintessential Christmas tale. It is a story told a thousand times that the author of David Copperfield wrote and published in 1843.
In the original edition, by Chapman and Hall, the full title appears: A Christmas Carol: In prose – Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. A ghost story, then.
Dickens understood Victorian society better than many politicians, and his work is almost a preface to the secular extreme social therapies of Marx and Engels. In A Christmas CarolDickens uses the three Christmas spirits, three ghosts that converge on the old miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who torment him, but who, in the end, redeem him.
The spirit of Christmas past brings to Scrooge’s memory a past in which, not yet poisoned by avarice, he was happy; that of Christmas presents, shows the harm he does to his neighbors, his family, his employees; that of future Christmases, reveals to him the loneliness, the abandonment, the death to which his path will lead him.
Frightened by the vision of what awaits him, Scrooge regrets it and transforms himself. The wonderful and discreet supernatural touch given by the ghosts (which the happy ending transforms into beneficent spirits) made the success and immortality of Dickens’ tale.
Dickens was also one of the first marketing phenomena, with tours across Europe and the United States – where, moreover, he inspired a wealthy Boston industrialist to make Christmas Day a holiday for his workers and to freely distribute turkeys. This less green side of the miracle of social awareness operated by Dickens’ tale led Thackeray to write that, if or Carol he had contributed to “lighting hundreds of kind Christmas fireworks” and to a wave of goodwill flooding the season, he had also contributed to the institution of the “terrible turkey massacre”.
And the fashion for “Christmas stories” caught on. Of the Portuguese in the second half of the 19th century, there is Natal Minho by Ramalho Ortigão, a Christmas when “the object of worship, admiration, and delight for little ones was the old nativity scene, so naive, so full of laughing, picturesque, festive, unexpected things”. And the Gentle Miracleby Eça de Queirós, fascinating for the kid I was. The story, which I will never forget, began like this: “Now between Enganim and Caesarea, in a stray hut, hidden in the fold of a hill, there lived a widow at that time…”
And the widow, an archetype of the most miserable misery the land of Israel had ever seen, had a son, also miserable, crippled, hungry, who wanted to see Jesus, this Jesus that the rich Obed and the powerful Seventh had already searched for in vain with their servants and soldiers. The mother telling her about the impossibility of finding “the sweet rabbi” and the boy always insisting: “Mom, I wanted to see Jesus…”
And then there is the denouement, the unique, unexpected and sacred moment in which He opens the door, smiles and says to the boy: “Here I am.”
But my favorite Christmas story is by an American, William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), who signed O. Henry. In the tale The Gift of the MagiDella and Jim love each other and want to give each other Christmas presents, but they are poor. Della has a beautiful head of hair, Jim has a gold watch. Della sells her hair to buy a platinum chain for Jim’s watch; Jim sells the watch to buy combs worthy of Della’s hair. In the end, the combs, without the hair, are useless, and the chain is useless without the watch; but, like the gifts of the Magi, they are proof and sign of the love that forgets itself and transcends everything, of the total gift that is born unexpectedly in poverty.
A Holy Christmas.
Political scientist and writer
The author writes according to the old spelling