Sunday, December 18, 2011

Again with the Dickens

When I require wisdom, I find myself going to the Dickens. Earlier this year I quoted from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and damned if I'm not going to do it again. Because sometimes my own words seem affectless and dingy when I need them most to shine, but his never do.

So, for a friend who is choosing to shut out not only Christmas but the people who celebrate it, here are words that are better than mine.

*****

"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 a 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 on '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!"

"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.

"Nephew!" returned the uncle, sternly, "keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine."

"Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's nephew. "But you don't keep it."

"Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge. "Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!"

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew: "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round - apart from 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 time:  the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by 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. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

*****

Christmas, my friend, is like the little tree Charlie Brown picked out. As Linus said, it's not so bad; it just needs a little love.


To all my Drunkards, whether you keep Christmas or not, I wish you a little love this season.

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