By KAREN PARKER | County Line Publisher Emeritus
Sometime between the turkey and the pie, I found time over the long weekend to watch “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” I don’t think the 2017 movie made a big splash, although it did garner an impressive number of good reviews.
It is one more version of “A Christmas Carol,” this time told from the view of Dickens as he struggles to write what will become one of the most popular stories of all time and adapted into 20-plus movies, cartoons and who knows what else?
The first time I saw “A Christmas Carol,” I was huddled in the big seats in the Goetz Theater in Monroe. I don’t know if it was the 1935 or the 1951 version, but it frightened me nearly to insensibility. To a second-grader, the ghost of Jacob Marley was terrifying, and even Christmas Past, Present and Future would have been frightening to meet in a hallway.
Dickens was already a successful novelist in 1843, but he had a large family and a bad habit of spending more than he made. His most recent book was not selling well. He was also deeply concerned about the child labor that occurred in England among the poor. His own childhood was difficult, and he was often separated from his family and forced to labor in sweat shops at a young age.
Dickens first conceived of his project as a pamphlet, which he planned on calling, “An Appeal to the People of England on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.”
But he thought better of it and decided that he might fare better with a story that would engage the public, rather than a scolding lecture.
Dickens was horrified that young girls worked seven-day weeks sewing clothing for the middle class while boys as young as 8 worked 16-hour days dragging coal carts through subterranean passages. Denied proper food and fresh air, they often contracted disease and died young.
How, or even if, to help the poor was widely debated. Most thought the poor tended to be so because they were lazy and immoral and that helping them would only encourage their malingering. Sound familiar?
The solution was to make things so awful that the poor would be discouraged from seeking help. Workhouses were the perfect solution where families were split up, food was scarce, and people were nothing more than machines.
“Those who are badly off,” says the unreformed Scrooge, “must go there.”
Some, like Karl Marx, saw a worker revolution, but Dickens believed that society had failed to solve the problem.
Thus, in just eight weeks, he scribbled out the “The Christmas Carol.” He called it a “sledgehammer blow” to the way society thought about the poor and the economy. In Scrooge, Dickens created a character who came to reject the notion workers were mere commodities: not individual humans, but only resources, their value measured in how fast they could put a nut on a bolt.
Through Scrooge, he told us employers are responsible for the well-being of their employees. That they are more than cogs in a wheel or a means for the owner to acquire wealth.
In “A Christmas Carol,” Dickens made the connection between Christmas and charity. It is the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s former business partner, who in death comes to understand “mankind was my business; the common welfare was my business.”
Dickens book sold all 6,000 copies the first day of publication, and it has never been out of print in the past 177 years.
The endurance of “A Christmas Carol” and the values it represents is further evidence that the “War on Christmas” was nothing more than utter nonsense.
You might think it began with Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host who had a talent for inciting culture wars and then throwing gas on the fire. If he had just been happy with turning people against one another, he would still have a job, but, no, he got caught paying millions to settle six sexual assault cases, and Fox bid him farewell.
But O’Reilly doesn’t get points for innovative thinking.
Snopes.com notes that one of the first to claim that Christmas was under siege was the notorious racist and anti-Semite Henry Ford. “Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth,” the automaker complained in 1921, going on to blame “Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and certain patriotic songs.”
In the 1950s, the far-right John Birch Society published a pamphlet called “There Goes Christmas?!” It warned that “one of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to take Christ out of Christmas — to denude the event of its religious meaning. … What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.”
I’m not sure what a UN decoration looks like, but I bet you could find one on Amazon.com to replace your Christmas tree.
The War on Christmas died down some time back, after President Trump had declared victory over the “happy holidays,” left-wing, do-nothing Democrats.
But last week, our dear leader announced the War on Thanksgiving, and the battle is enjoined. Give the leftover turkey to the cats, hide the pumpkin pie and save yourself from the Politically Correct Police. I can only think of one thing to say to this.
“Bah,” said Scrooge, “Humbug.”
