“If I could work my will, 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.”

Early illustration by John Leech, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

What sort of Scrooge could say such a thing, you ask? Why, Charles Dickens’ Scrooge, of course, the original meanie himself. If you haven’t read A Christmas Carol recently, you should go back to give it a try. I did, and I was surprised by the colloquial vigor of much of the language and the power of the familiar story to move me.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stage or screen version of it that has really touched me all that much, but reading it straight through the other night I was astonished to find myself with big tears dripping down my cheeks as I turned the last page. I’ll definitely take the time to read it aloud to my children this season.

What inspired me to take another look at the old chestnut was an interview on NPR. Diane Rehm profiled Les Standiford’s new book, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits. Besides being a fascinating story of an artist struggling to keep himself afloat at a low point in his career–Dickens had to finance and self-publish A Christmas Carol because nobody else believed it had a chance of succeeding–the book is also a timely reminder that much of what we believe to be “traditional” or even “timeless” about our Christmas celebrations has a fairly recent history.

There were no Christmas cards in 1843 England, no Christmas trees at royal residences or White Houses, no Christmas turkeys, no department-store Santa or his million clones, no outpouring of “Yuletide greetings,” no weeklong cessation of business affairs through the New Year, no orgy of gift-giving, no ubiquitous public display of nativity scenes (or court fights regarding them), no holiday lighting extravaganzas, and no plethora of midnight services celebrating the birth of a savior. In fact, despite all of Dickens’ enthusiasms, the holiday was a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter, causing little more stir than Memorial Day or St. George’s Day does today. In the eyes of the relatively enlightened Anglican Church, moreover, the entire enterprise of celebrating Christmas smacked vaguely of paganism, and were there Puritans still around, acknowledging the holiday might have landed one in the stocks.

Totally — and correctly — contradicting the title of The Man Who Invented Christmas, which probably is the invention of someone in his publisher’s marketing department, Standiford says that “no individual can claim credit for the creation of Christmas, of course — except, perhaps, the figure that the day is named for.” No, Dickens did not “invent” Christmas. But he “played a major role in transforming a celebration dating back to pre-Christian times, revitalizing forgotten customs and introducing new ones that now define the holiday,” including the turkey as the centerpiece of the day’s feast