The Greatest Christmas Scene Ever

Christmas Day in A Christmas Carol

Christmas looms large in our imaginations, especially when it comes to stories (ask Hallmark). You might not attend church, but on one level or another, we all believe in Christmas.

I have a friend who once wrote a nice short film that took place over a Christmas holiday. But it didn’t work at all. The characters mentioned Christmas at the beginning, and from that point on, it was in the Christmas genre, and there was no escaping the gravity of it. Christmas ruined her film just because she mentioned it and didn’t honor the expectations that came with it.

Christmas is that powerful.

The Eerie Psychology of This Time of Year

But what is the power? And what is it that we all believe in, even those who don’t particularly believe in Christ?

A lot of it is the winter solstice. Since before written history, this time of year has been celebrated by many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere. The solstice is the shortest day of the year; the day with the most darkness. And if you only have the evidence of your eyes, from October on, everything has been dying. The days become shorter, the weather grows colder. In the absence of a telescope and a good theory about celestial mechanics, why wouldn’t you assume the world was dying? Everything you can proves it.

Sure, it didn’t happen last year. But this year could be different. Maybe this winter is colder and more aggressive. Maybe Yorvik’s wife read terrible omens in the ox bones. Maybe you’re cold, tired, starving, and losing hope. And the light dies away a little bit more each day.

This year, the solstice was December 21st. Where I live, December 20th had 9:46:56 of daylight. The 21st had 9:46:55 of daylight—less than a second’s difference. By tomorrow, Christmas, the 25th, there will be about 30 seconds more daylight. Now, that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s probably enough that you can use measuring tools like Stonehenge to discover that the days are getting longer each day.

The sun is returning, and the world can be reborn for another year.

It’s probably impossible for you to understand what this time meant to earlier people. This was the time every year that you got word that Armageddon, Doomsday, or Ragnarok wasn’t going to happen this year. You get another chance. It is the rebirth of everything.

New Year’s resolutions still have this flavor. If you’ve ever said, “This year is gonna be different,” you’ve got part of it.

This is an essential part of the Old Testament promise that the world is reborn after the flood and that God will never destroy the world again. And, of course, it’s an essential part of the Christian promise that Christ has redeemed the sins of the world and that the faithful are granted everlasting life.

Christ in the humble manger is an amazing visual, echoed in nativity displays around the world. But it’s not really a ‘scene’ the way I use the word when I write about scenes. So, while it is undoubtedly the most fundamental Christmas image—the beginning of it all—it’s not my pick for the best scene. The story of Christ can well be called ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told,’ for it is unquestionably the most influential story ever told. But my pick for the best Christmas story and scene goes to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

It is impossible to overpraise this story. Not only is it the best Christmas story ever written, but it is also in the running for the best ghost story ever written. If you grew up with the tale, it can be hard to get the necessary distance to see it clearly. How is it even possible that Dickens wrote one story that tops two genres and has remained undefeated for 181 years?

For me, the best scene in it is the scene where Scrooge awakes a changed man on Christmas Day.

There have been many film adaptations of it, and from what I have seen, they all work—which is also remarkable. A story that works no matter what you do to it. Who do you like as Scrooge? Alastair Sim, George C. Scott, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Bill Murray, Jim Carrey? Fine, they’re all good. Here’s two:

But as much as I love the Muppet version of anything I don’t think any of the film versions are as good as the story that Dickens wrote. His text captures something fundamental that I don’t think you can get on a screen.

The Thing that Novels Do Best

For me, the thing that novels can do better than any other medium is reveal the interior life of a character. This kind of psychological depth seems to have fallen out of favor in modern novels, which have largely become screenplays in narrative format. I love minimal, action-only writing and have written a book and a novella in this style (The Soak and The Lucky Dime). But I still can’t see it as an optimal use of the form.

One of the most powerful ways to reveal the psychological depth of a character is to describe something as they see it. Sure, character descriptions are great, but characters describing is way more powerful.

Here’s how Dickens describes Scrooge:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

Dialog and character action is also good.

“Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”

“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.

“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? 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. He should!”

Scrooge, of course, is visited by three spirits and experiences a conversion. He awakes on Christmas Day, grateful to still be alive and to have a chance to make things different. But for me, the power in this change is not conveyed by what he does, but how he now finds joy in everything he encounters.

The cold, clear air:

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!

Even his old door knocker:

As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker caught his eye. “I shall love it, as long as I live!” cried Scrooge, patting it with his hand. “I scarcely ever looked at it before. What an honest expression it has in its face! It’s a wonderful knocker!

For Scrooge, after his conversion, every action reverberates with the joy of being alive.

“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.

Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when you don’t dance while you are at it. But if he had cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of sticking-plaister over it, and been quite satisfied.

Even if he cut off his nose, he’d still be happy.

The conventional reading of the story is that he discovers his happiness because he is no longer selfish, but I am not so sure. Another valid way to read the story is that finding real in being alive makes him generous.

Look at his reaction to the boy he asks to go buy the turkey.

“Do you know the Poulterer’s, in the next street but one, at the corner?” Scrooge inquired.

“I should hope I did,” replied the lad.

“An intelligent boy!” said Scrooge. “A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?—Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?”

“What, the one as big as me?” returned the boy.

“What a delightful boy!” said Scrooge. “It’s a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!”

The boy isn’t doing anything remarkably intelligent or delightful, but Scrooge is happy because he finds him so. There is an element of the Quixotic to this behavior as the very end of the story acknowledges.

Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

He will make of the world something beautiful no matter who laughs at him.

Sol Invictus, Christmas, Dickens, Hallmark and Us

The Romans celebrated Sol Invictus, the festival of the Unconquered Sun, on December 25th. 70 years or so after the first Sol Invictus, the first Christmas as the birth of Christ was celebrated in AD 336. There is plenty of argument about who did what first in terms of religious practice, but if one can detach from quibbles and look at the larger theme, the meaning of this time has remained the same for thousands and thousands of years across many cultures. It is rebirth: the chance to see and make the world anew.

Seeing and making are more closely related than we often realize. Two people faced with the same set of circumstances can create vastly different experiences. And we get stuck, you know? It’s also hard to see what you have until you’ve lost it.

Christmas is the antidote to all of that. A time to be grateful for what you have. To give. And, if only for just a moment, to attempt to remake the world as a better place.

All of that could easily be taken from any overly sentimental Hallmark movie ever made. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, it just means that the genre has been strip-mined for emotion.

For me, the reason Dickens wrote the greatest Christmas scene ever is that, while we have made these ideas into cliches, in his writing, they are still fresh, powerful, and original 181 years later. That’s why ‘A Christmas Carol’ has never gone out of print. Here’s hoping it never does.

Merry Christmas and Happy Everything Else