WHERE WE CELEBRATE THE SEASON OF PEACE AND JOY, PART TWO
Are you there?
Yes, we are here.
As promised, here is another post celebrating the holiday season. This time, I would like to share with all of you a bit about the history of the celebration of Christmas along with a wonderful excerpt from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, who I believe captures the love and warmth of the holiday season better than anyone.
Perhaps no single individual in human history has had more influence on the way we celebrate Christmas today than Charles Dickens. At the beginning of the Victorian period, most people did not celebrate Christmas with the same enthusiasm we see today. Indeed, the whole idea of Christmas as a legitimate holiday was on the wane for the Victorians. The medieval Christmas traditions, which combined the celebration of the birth of Christ with the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia (a pagan celebration for the Roman god of agriculture) and the Germanic winter festival of Yule, had come under intense scrutiny by the Puritans led by Oliver Cromwell. In addition, the Industrial Revolution, at its height during Dickens’ time, allowed workers little time for the celebration of Christmas. With the introduction of Dickens’ writing into Victorian society, however, ordinary folk began to re-discover the joys of Christmas.
This revival of Christmas traditions during Victorian times received help from other sources as well. It was Prince Albert, for instance, who brought the German custom of decorating the Christmas tree to England. The singing of Christmas carols (which had all but disappeared at the turn of the century) also began to thrive again. And the first Christmas cards appeared in the 1840s. Still, it was the Christmas stories of Dickens, particularly his 1843 masterpiece “A Christmas Carol,” that rekindled the Christmas spirit in Britain and America. Today, 160 years later, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge and his inspiring spiritual reclamation continues to be relevant, sending a message that cuts through the materialistic trappings of the season and moves right to the heart and soul of the holidays.
Christmas was always Dickens’ favorite time of the year. He described the holidays as “the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
In addition to “A Christmas Carol,” there are many, many references to Christmas throughout Dickens’ writing. Here is one of my favorites, an excerpt from “The Pickwick Papers,” in which Dickens describes a wistful, but joyful Christmas at Dingley Dell:
“We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!”
That was lovely, don’t you think?
Indeed.
I think so, too. In the meantime…
HAPPY HOLIDAYS, EVERYONE!!!
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