Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts

Friday, December 20, 2024

Karen S. Wiesner {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: "The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge" by Charlie Lovett


{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: "The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge"

by Charlie Lovett

by Karen S. Wiesner


"Merry Christmas" ringing out in the sweltering heat of a June summer? What else would be on the lips of a transformed man after the events of "A Christmas Carol" (which was the focus of my December 22, 2023 column "The Practice of Benevolence {A Reflection on Dicken's A Christmas Carol}" https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-practice-of-benevolence-reflection.html). "The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge" by Charlie Lovett--author of such highly recommended literary mystery titles as The Bookman's Tale and First Impressions--was published in 2015, which came 172 years after Dickens' timeless tale.

In this, Scrooge's testimony of a transformed life, twenty years have passed since he was visited by the ghosts that changed everything in a single night. His radical shift, as the joy and benevolence of Christmas become an integral part of his daily life, have spilled over to those around him, altering them as well, but not always for the better. Scrooge gives of himself and his wealth sacrificially--leaving little or nothing for his own meager requirements--to all in need. Nothing discourages his cheer. However, the hard lessons he's learned haven't necessarily carried over to those he loves.

His nephew Fred (Freddie) has a wife and family, along with an uncompromising governmental position working for the assistant to the undersecretary. Unfortunately, he's grasped that, "with bills to pay…books to balance…a year older and not a farthing richer", he can afford no more than a few days of Christmas each year.

In Scrooge's own business, Bob Cratchit has been made a partner, only he's allowed his extreme work ethic to dominate his life to the exclusion of his once beloved family and their many grandchildren.

Meanwhile, the bankers (affectionately called Pleasant and Portly by Scrooge) have become more concerned with Scrooge's current balance of outstanding debt rather than "making some slight concession for the poor" not simply once a year at the holidays. Scrooge writes cheques his account can't cover in order to help the destitute running rampant in their city.

That evening, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley. His heavy chains of penance have been lessened by Scrooge's redemption--but only by five links. Marley holds no hope that he can ever decrease it more. Scrooge is determined to help his old friend eliminate the weighty burden and send him to a well-deserved rest. To do that, he calls upon the familiar spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future to teach valuable lessons about living Christmas charity all year round to Freddie, Bob, and the bankers.

Although I was originally put off by the idea of the characters I knew and loved in the original story taking on the less than appealing traits Scrooge once displayed (essentially becoming hypocrites, as the only time of year that seemed to bring out goodwill in all of them was at Christmas), I did find the evolving facets of their personality realistic:

·       In "A Christmas Carol", Scrooge's nephew was very young, newly married, without a family and position as the breadwinner and a member of society to weigh him down. With greater responsibility come greater burdens.

·       Cratchit was moved overnight from apprentice to partner, and he'd known Scrooge long enough not to be fully trusting that that situation couldn't change in a duplicitous heartbeat.

·       And bankers…well, bankers are known for loving wealth, not spreading it around as if it's easy to come by.

I was also won over by how Lovett took familiar quotes from the original "paraphrasing, parodying, and plagiarizing passages" (as he says). Because of the clever repurposing Lovett did with those beloved sections, I began to notice that this story was structured and laid out almost scene by scene just as the original story had been. In that way, "The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge" stayed true to its processor.

Additionally, Lovett incorporated Dickens--also a great social reformer in his time, as his debatably most famous character Scrooge became--into this story with references of Dickens as a famous author in Scrooge's time. Finally, allusions were made to Dickens' other works, where he described the less fortunate in Victorian London in such works as Bleak House, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, and others.

If you love re-reading the enduring morals taught in "A Christmas Carol" during the holidays as I do, you'll adore "The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge" any time of year as an apt reminder that not only can we bless others less fortunate than ourselves with our kindness and benevolence, but that we inevitably receive the same in exchange by opening our hands and our hearts. In this way, we also further the game-changing principle of "paying it forward" one precious life at a time.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Friday, December 13, 2024

Beware Ignorance and Want by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Beware Ignorance and Want

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

 

From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:

 They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread. 

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude. 

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.  

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!”

The cells that make up the body--whether human, animal, or even plant--are countless, diversified, and specialized. There are different types that each do something special, all with the goal of working efficiently with the rest of the cells. In this way, the body can run so smoothly, few of us are even aware of their existence.

Some cells work with larger organisms within the body. For instance, white blood cells subject themselves to the determination of a higher function that assigns it specific duties. At the times when an invader enters the body, the white blood cell rushes toward danger, often forced to sacrifice itself for the sake of the function it serves. Both danger and self-sacrifice are at the heart of its very existence. For the greater good, it does what it has to in order to defend and keep the body alive. 

Cells don't always work "in community" though. For whatever reason, a cell can become selfish and superior, working against the body with every fiber of its being to serve its own ends. A parasite or cancer cell, literally, considers nothing except its own survival and what it needs to thrive. They maintain complete independence of the whole while freely and selfishly partaking in the benefits of being part of the body. These cells leave the body in want, weaker and sickened. 

In a similar way, individual cells that make up a body are like a community. When all are working together in one place, each undeniably functions better--to the best of their ability. Unconditionally, the individuals within the community share in the fruits and privileges of belonging together. Individual parts have no choice about whether they can live or thrive separate from the rest of the body. A hand, a foot, an eye--none of these can live apart from the rest of the body. But, by existing as a coherent team, everyone flourishes. 

Also, like cells, communities don't always exist in harmony. A community at odds keeps all within it divided and at war, shrouded in the ignorance of shunning everything and everyone around them that doesn't fit a limited agenda. 

Charles Dickens' beloved A Christmas Carol goes out of its way to show us that we can't choose a single day of the year to effect changes within a community that will benefit the whole. Social responsibility must be a daily, continuous pursuit. But so often our global body (our community) is ripped apart by self-focus and flavor of the day, hot-button disagreements. Like cancer cells or parasites, these agendas feed off the slightest bit of hate, superiority, ignorance, and want. 

Another universal truth highlighted in A Christmas Carol is that, when everyone is treating everyone else with respect, regardless of natural or preferential diversity, they become "…fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." Every part that makes up a body is unique and crucial, even if it's unaware of all each does to make the whole better and healthy. All are equal. None are superior. Humility, acceptance, cooperation, and daily goodwill are the only ways for a body and a community to function. 

This time of the year and every other, human beings can learn a lot from the way our own bodies function in the ideal when every part is grateful for the rest. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Thursday, December 12, 2024

Old-Fashioned Holidays

Having recently discovered we own a copy of Washington Irving's SKETCH BOOK, published around 1820 (one of the books we inherited from my mother-in-law, many of which I shelved without looking at closely), I read his essays/stories about English festivities surrounding Christmas Eve, Christmas day, and Christmas dinner. The narrator, an American visiting England, comments with delight on the customs of the season. The host, a merry old squire, insists on keeping the time-honored traditions as he understands them. None of this modern stuff allowed! Centuries-old songs are sung, games of venerable vintage are played, wassailers are welcomed, the Yule log is burned, a decorated pig's head is ceremoniously carried to the dinner table in lieu of a boar's head. The kindly old gentleman, however, is widely considered eccentric for his devotion to the past. Some of the guests carefully chosen from among the "decent" subset of the local peasantry snicker behind his back. Although the narrator enjoys the celebrations, he makes it clear that the squire is reconstructing traditional customs as he imagines them, not passing them on unbroken from previous generations.

According to THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, by Stephen Nissenbaum, our concept of an "old-fashioned Christmas" derives in large part from these "sketches" by Irving as well as "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (aka "The Night Before Christmas"), by his contemporary Clement Clarke Moore, and of course Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Nissenbaum offers strong evidence that the Saint Nicholas legend brought to life by Moore didn't cross over intact from Holland. Instead, Santa Claus as popularized in early 19th-century New York and immortalized by Moore was "a conscious reconstruction. . . an invented tradition."

Similarly, Nissenbaum's research reveals that the Christmas tree constituted a purely local custom in a small area of Germany until it became nationwide only in the late 18th century. Moreover, instead of spontaneously spreading from German immigrant communities to the wider American population, Christmas trees first became familiar to the general public from literary sources. Yet already by the mid-19th century people would casually remark that of course they always displayed a tree, as if it were a long-established tradition. Popularization of trees, Santa Claus, and gift-giving went along with the invention of the domestic, child-centered holiday, replacing the REAL "old-fashioned Christmas." To us, the older celebration would look like a rowdy blend of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and New Year's Eve.

Invented traditions continue to spring up in our own era. How could we now imagine the American Christmas season without Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer annually appearing on TV? Yet his story was originally written as an advertising giveaway book for the Montgomery Ward department store in 1939. In a short essay published in the 1950s, C. S. Lewis complains of the Yuletide "commercial racket," implying the phenomenon had intruded on the season quite recently. As Nissenbaum describes at length, though, commercialization of gift-giving infested the child-centered holiday from the beginning. The film A CHRISTMAS STORY, what I think of as "the BB gun movie," presumably set pre-World-War-II like the book it's based on, showcases a department store Santa in a lavishly consumerist setting.

In my childhood home, Christmas traditions included having the extended family over on Christmas Eve, emerging from our bedrooms the next morning to the sight of a dazzling spread of presents from Santa, and driving to my grandmother's house for Christmas dinner. (When I could get away with it, I sat in a corner reading a new book; I figured that shouldn't be a problem because the adults would be talking to each other, not to me, anyway.) Our kids' Christmas traditions, in addition to church, festive dinners, and gifts, involved watching programs such as Rudolph, Charlie Brown, the Grinch (the Boris Karloff cartoon, of course!), and later the BB gun movie. Nowadays, with the prevalence of streaming media, the custom of a family gathering around the TV to watch one show together threatens to die out, if it hasn't already. What will our great-grandchildren (we currently have four) look back on as cherished holiday traditions that have "always" been done?

For many of us, a "traditional" holiday means customs as we imagine them having been celebrated in our grandparents' childhoods, whenever that may have been. "Over the river and through the woods. . . ." With snow, naturally, "dreaming of a white Christmas," even if we live in a region where the most we can expect are a few flurries in January. As Rudyard Kipling's ode of farewell to Romance -- in the sense of an imagined, ideal past more romantic than the dull, mundane present -- concludes, "Then taught his chosen bard to say: Our king was with us -- yesterday."

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Friday, December 22, 2023

The Practice of Benevolence {A Reflection on Dickens' A Christmas Carol} by Karen S. Wiesner


The Practice of Benevolence

{A Reflection on Dickens' A Christmas Carol}

by Karen S. Wiesner


One of my all-time favorite stories is and always will be Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843. I imagine it's a story nearly everyone everywhere has heard in one form or another. For my part, I try to read the novella and watch one of the countless film adaptations every year around Christmas. Dickens wrote, "I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it."

The messages in this story are timeless. I did an internet search asking what the major themes in this undeniable classic are, and almost none of the offerings that came up could focus on just one because there are so many good messages in this one little tale. Here's my attempt at coming up with a motif for the story:

The spirit of benevolence and goodwill toward our fellow human beings throughout the year is in the eternal need for compassion, kindness, and mercy to all, as well as the transformative power of change coming from within.

Benevolence is the disposition to do good, embodying a genuine desire to promote kindness, charity, and positive attitudes toward others along with an inclination to perform acts of goodwill or extend help to those in need. A benevolent person actively seeks opportunities to benefit others, often without expecting anything in return.

Our world and the people in it often aren't a very good reflection of that description, wouldn't you agree? Selfishness, putting one's desires first, despising one another because of our differences looks like the norm in this day and age--as, in truth, it was at the time Dickens wrote the story and probably has been all throughout time. Does this description of Scrooge (written 180 years ago!) from the narrator of the story sound like anyone you know? I can think of several (including myself) who fit some or all of the points:

"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… But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance..."

I thought it would be illuminating to explore the many good lessons taught, in quotes, by the characters in A Christmas Carol as they reflect on life. Draw what conclusions you will from each quote, but I think most of the truths are self-evident.

Jacob Marley's Reflections of Life:

“I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."

"...no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused!"

"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Fred 's (Scrooge's Nephew) Reflections of Life:

"...I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time...as...the only time I know of...when men and women seem by one 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..."

“…his offences carry their own punishment… I am sorry for him; I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims! Himself, always."

Bob Crachit's Reflections of Life:

Bob told them of the extraordinary kindness of Mr. Scrooge’s nephew… "…he is the pleasantest-spoken gentleman you ever heard… 'If I can be of service to you in any way,’ he said, giving me his card, ‘…Pray come to me.' "Now, it wasn’t for the sake of anything he might be able to do for us, so much as for his kind way..."

Ghost of Christmas Past's Reflections of Life:

"Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it…

 “What!” exclaimed the Ghost, “would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow!”

Ghost of Christmas Present's Reflections of Life:

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”

Ghost of Christmas Future's Reflections of Life (note: this ghost didn't actually speak out loud, but Scrooge inferred its intentions based on the things shown to him by it):

"Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man’s. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal! … No voice pronounced these words in Scrooge’s ears, and yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed. He thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be his foremost thoughts? Avarice, hard-dealing, griping cares? They have brought him to a rich end, truly! … He lay, in the dark empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him... “Spirit!” he cried, tight clutching at its robe, “hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope! ... Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!”

Ebenezer Scrooge's Reflections of Life:

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”

Narrator's Reflections of Life:

"He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew…"

We live in a world that's ever in need of the very things that are least evident in it. Hatred, intolerance, and violence over things that shouldn't but inevitably and inescapably do divide us against our fellow human beings have become our daily bread. Every day, each one of us commits offenses against others in some way, shape, or form. As I reflect on this sad commentary, I often consider how much good benevolence would have on us and our world throughout the year, if only we practiced it.

Instead of fighting over all the wrong we see others doing, what if we as a whole didn't specify wrongdoing (as in transgressions, flaws, weaknesses, vices, and regrets) into its unlimited categories, instead generalizing wrongs as "wrongs"? We're all carrying around a big bag of those wrongs. If we didn't look inside everyone's "bag of wrongs", wouldn't we have to conclude that we're all equal in the eyes of God as well as each other? Would we then conclude--since we're all carrying around a bag of wrongs, regardless of what's inside--that maybe we should have compassion on one another and accept that we individually are not the only one in need of grace, forgiveness, and unquantified mercy? At that point, could we minister, show kindness and empathy for each other in the name of goodwill toward all? Consider also that, if we realize it's not our place to punish others for their perceived wrongs, a tremendous weight is lifted from our shoulders, leaving us free to pursue peace instead.

We're all on the road to death, and every single road in life inescapably leads to that conclusion. If we're all on even ground, then no one is better or more righteous than the next one, right? In the same vein, no one is more sinful than another either. We're all the same. If we each deserve unilateral hatred and scorn, then, by the same token, don't we all deserve unbiased love and tenderness? Shouldn't we then practice benevolence as our common ground? In this way, respect and courtesy could and should be given to every single person on the planet regardless of who we are and what's inside our particular bag of wrongs.

For as long as breath remains in our lungs, life in our bodies, blood in our veins, it's not too late to live out the benevolence of A Christmas Carol to the world around us every single day. In this way, we each do our part in sowing the world with life immortal.


Read A Christmas Carol free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm#link12.

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/


Thursday, November 23, 2023

Thanksgiving and Traditions

Happy American Thanksgiving! Ordinarily we spend the weekend after Turkey Day at ChessieCon, formerly Darkover Grand Council, which has traditionally occurred every Thanksgiving weekend for several decades. Last November they held their first in-person con since 2019. At that time it moved from the hotel where it's been held for many years to a different one in the same general area, north of Baltimore. Attendance turned out to be dismayingly low. Doubtless in part for that reason, the committee decided to cancel this year's event and take time off to regroup and rethink the con's future. On top of that, the hotel it had moved to abruptly closed a few months ago. Where will ChessieCon go next, if anywhere? Will we lose this venerable local SF/F tradition?

Thanksgiving traditions typically include the familiar turkey and its required accessories, e.g., stuffing, potatoes, and gravy. Some households, however, depart from the conventional menu for more adventurous fare. For instance, our second son and his family eschew turkey in favor of entrees such as homemade sushi. Many Americans also consider TV football essential on that day.

In mainline Christian churches, the first Sunday of Advent, the build-up to Christmas, falls on or near the first weekend of December. Most of us now accept as inevitable and proper that the winter holiday shopping and decorating season begins on the day after Thanksgiving. However, when Christmas and other winter-themed displays in stores overlap with Halloween merchandise, and internet merchants advertise "Black Friday" sales starting over a week early, many of us think the extension of the season is going too far. Commercialization of Christmas gifting, though, started almost simultaneously with the invention of the family-centered Christmas as we know it in the nineteenth century. Moreover, people have been complaining about it almost as long.

The popular film A CHRISTMAS STORY, aka the BB gun movie, set around 1940, based on Jean Shepherd's fictionalized memoir IN GOD WE TRUST: ALL OTHERS PAY CASH, illustrates how even before the middle of the twentieth century intensive holiday gift advertising and department store Santas already pervaded the Christmas-season consciousness of American children. Our parents and grandparents didn't experience some newer Christmas traditions that existed in our childhoods and those of our children, because those customs depend on new technology, mainly television. Many people watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, culminating in the arrival of Santa Claus. They also enjoy favorite Christmas specials over and over. Nowadays we don't have to wait for those treasured memories to show up in reruns; we can view them on home video media or streaming services at will. I always watch at least two versions of A CHRISTMAS CAROL every year, usually more. We can also look forward to original programs reliably appearing every December, such as one of my favorites, the annual new CALL THE MIDWIFE Christmas episode.

If our grandparents had been able to peer into the future and note these novel customs, they might have disdained them as soulless products of technology, violating the true spirit of the season. For us and our children, recurring winter holiday movies and TV shows simply became an expected part of the celebration, cherished traditions as much as the tree, the feast, and the presents.

When some earthlings live in artificial habitats on the Moon or Mars or in generation-spanning starships, what holiday traditions will they bring along, and what fresh customs will life in extraterrestrial environments demand? It seems likely that even in locations vastly distant from Earth's solstice cycles, human beings will cling to the core elements of their seasonal celebrations.

Margaret L Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Thursday, November 02, 2023

Scary Solstice

I recently read a lavishly illustrated book about midwinter folklore, THE FRIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, by Jeff Belanger, featuring Krampus, the Yule Cat, Belsnickel, and many other Christmas-season monsters; however, it also covers some benevolent creatures such as La Befana, Saint Nicholas, and of course Santa Claus. Terrors lurk in the longest, darkest night at the coldest time of year. In the past, telling frightful tales at Christmas was a British tradition. Even now, a popular Christmas song mentions "scary ghost stories" along with caroling in the snow. Dickens's A CHRISTMAS CAROL is just the best known. Our preindustrial ancestors recognized the frightening aspect of midwinter; that's why the lights, fires, bells, feasting, and evergreens exist in the first place. They ward off the darkness and keep the demons at bay. Some of the Yuletide boogeymen used to serve as shadow counterparts of Saint Nicholas, punishing naughty children while he rewarded nice ones, in a sort of bad cop / good cop partnership.

Nowadays we joke about getting coal in stockings from Santa if we haven't been "good" (sometimes with the contemporary angle that coal might be a reward instead of a punishment when energy costs rise). Saint Nick's old-style sidekicks or substitutes, though, would beat naughty children with sticks, haul them away in sacks to an unspecified fate, or eat them. On the other hand, if you're lucky you might get a visit from the Italian witch Befana, who may sweep your house in addition to leaving gifts for children. The animated film THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS beautifully highlights the traditional solstice ambiguity of the festive combined with the monstrous. Likewise, in Terry Pratchett's HOGFATHER Death himself fills in for the Hogfather (Discworld's Santa) when the latter is temporarily unavailable.

A long time ago in an online writing group, I read a story about an alternate world in which Santa is a frightening figure who comes down the chimney at midwinter to perpetrate terrible acts. From a certain point of view, a mysteriously omniscient man who constantly watches you from afar and sneaks into your house in the middle of the night regardless of locked doors DOES sound sinister.

Ellen Datlow's new anthology CHRISTMAS AND OTHER HORRORS explores the dark side of the winter solstice in a variety of stories featuring Christmas and other seasonal celebrations and customs. Some of the horrors are based on actual folklore, others created by the individual authors.

Speaking of HOGFATHER, here's a link to my favorite quote from the entire Discworld series, Death's explanation of why human beings need myths and fantasies:

We Need Fantasy to Be Human

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Thursday, October 26, 2023

A World Without Christmas

The Hallmark channel has already begun its annual Countdown to Christmas movie marathon. For us (Episcopalians) the season runs from the first Sunday of Advent (early December) to Epiphany (January 6, aka Twelfth Night), and I keep the tree up at least until Epiphany. But starting before Halloween?!

Last Saturday night, I watched WHERE ARE YOU, CHRISTMAS? The protagonist wishes Christmas didn't exist and wakes up from a minor car crash to discover she's got her wish. She finds herself in an alternate reality where nobody else has heard of the holiday.

Does the script take into account any of the implications of a world with no Christmas? If they even thought of that aspect at all, they didn't bother, maybe to avoid complications that would distract from the theme of rediscovering the joy of the holiday. No Christmas implies no Jesus and no Christianity, a change that would make the history of Europe, Britain, and the Americas almost unrecognizable. As far as religion is concerned, you'd have Judaism, Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and modern-day versions of the various pagan cults. As for Islam, I conjecture it might not exist without Christianity, at least in a form we'd easily recognize. So we should see pagan temples all over the place and people celebrating Saturnalia and/or Yuletide. (Earth's history as portrayed in the cartoon series STEVEN UNIVERSE takes this sort of thing seriously. There's no Christianity, so we don't see Christmas, Halloween, or Valentine's Day.)

For a less drastic point of divergence from actual history, suppose the Reformation as a whole concurred with the Puritan belief that the feast of the Nativity shouldn't be celebrated because it's merely a Christian veneer over a pagan festival, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation adopted that position, too. In that case, we can imagine Christmas being abandoned in the early modern era. Therefore, some people would recognize the word "Christmas" when the heroine mentions it, but for the most part they'd be medieval historians, which she probably wouldn't encounter in a typical Hallmark-movie small town. Moreover, in every human society outside of the tropics (as discussed in Stephen Nissenbaum's delightful book THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS), the winter solstice has been celebrated by feasting and other forms of excess. In the absence of Yule or some other pagan observance, what, in this alternative universe, replaces Christmas? Apparently New Year's celebrations dominate the winter festive season, although this point is mentioned only once. The dialogue includes a slyly self-referential remark about New Year's-themed TV movies starting to air in June.

Aside from the practical difficulties of fitting this kind of speculation into a two-hour feature film (including commercial breaks), I suspect there's not much overlap between writers of alternate-history SF and made-for-TV romance movies.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Thursday, December 08, 2022

Commercialized Holidays

Recently I saw a Facebook post lamenting the materialistic nature of the Christmas season nowadays. The holidays focus too much on buying and receiving presents. Advertisers swamp us with messages encouraging greed. Oh, for the old-fashioned, gentle, family-centered Christmases of his youth. Well, this person appears to be around my age (mid-70s), and I remember childhood holiday preparations characterized by frenetic seasonal advertising and feverish anticipation of presents. (Of course, we were ad-bombed by less sophisticated technology, and the store displays probably went up slightly later in the year, but it was the same general kind of atmosphere.)

In A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS, first broadcast in 1965, Charlie famously asks what Christmas is all about, as he despairs over the commercialization of the holiday, with even Snoopy embracing the hype.

In 1957, C. S. Lewis published an essay called "What Christmas Means to Me" (a title I'm almost certain wasn't chosen by Lewis himself, but that's beside the point). He says three things "go by the name of Christmas": First, the Christian religious festival. Second, "a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality." The third is "the commercial racket." Read this short essay in full to note how little that cultural aspect has changed, aside from the technology, since Lewis complained of it in the 1950s:

What Christmas Means to Me

A CHRISTMAS STORY (the BB gun movie), based on episodes in Jean Shepherd's fictionalized memoir IN GOD WE TRUST: ALL OTHERS PAY CASH, takes place in 1940; the real-life incidents underlying it probably occurred in the 1930s. The film shows a department-store Santa in an extravagantly decorated setting, with an assembly line of children waiting to declare their wishes.

According to Stephen Nissenbaum's THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, an analysis of the shift from the REAL old-fashioned Christmas of drinking, carousing, and house-to-house begging (wassailing) to the domestic, child-centered holiday we think of as a "traditional Christmas," concerns about commercialization sprang up concurrently with the cultural shift. Even before the mid-nineteenth century, merchants aggressively advertised their wares as perfect for seasonal gifting, while troubled moralists warned of Christmas becoming "laden with crass materialism" and producing a "generation of greedy, spoiled children."

In short, every era's nostalgic imagination relegates the traditional, unspoiled Christmas of bygone years to their parents' or grandparents' day, or maybe the generation before that. More accurately, that ideal holiday never existed in the first place.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, December 23, 2021

Anti-Santas

You've probably heard of Krampus, the horned, hairy, bipedal monster from Austrian legend who prowls in December, mainly on Saint Nicholas Day (December 6), and stuffs misbehaving children into his sack to drag them to Hell:

The Krampus Legend

He even has his own website (which appears not to have been updated recently, since the calendar of festive events refers to 2015):

Krampus.com

The Jungian shadow of Santa Claus has other traditional representatives, however. While we joke about naughty children getting coal from Santa instead of presents, those scary Yuletide figures often take over the punishment task, allowing Santa to remain the good guy. Belsnickel, a fur-clad sidekick of Santa in Germany and among German immigrants in Pennsylvania, does play a dual role. He carries both switches to beat bad children and candy for good children. Similarly, another Christmas companion from Germany, Knecht Ruprecht, gives treats to good children but switches and coal to bad ones. He may also beat the naughty kids with the bag of ashes he carries. In the Netherlands, Zwarte Piet (Black Pete, referring mainly to his sooty appearance) whips bad children with a birch rod or carries them off in his sack. Joulupukki, the Yule Goat of Finland, is sometimes portrayed as an ugly creature who frightens children.

In THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, an entertaining, in-depth exploration of how the true old-fashioned Christmas (which would look to us like a blend of Thanksgiving, Halloween, and New Year's Eve) was converted in the nineteenth century to the child-centered family holiday we know, author Stephen Nissenbaum analyzes the origins and purpose of Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (aka "The Night Before Christmas"). Nissenbaum draws striking line-by-line parallels between Moore's poem and "The Day of Doom," written by a Massachusetts clergyman in the seventeenth century and still popular in the early nineteenth. The major difference between the two works is that the poem about Saint Nicholas includes no threats of "doom" or "judgment." The "jolly old elf" offers only gifts and good cheer, no coal or switches for naughty children. Christmas was being domesticated.

Traditions of anti-Santas bring to mind THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, the movie in which Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, fascinated by the idea of Christmas but not fully understanding it, tries to appropriate the holiday because he thinks it should be more like Halloween. Likewise, in Terry Pratchett's fantasy novel HOGFATHER, when the existence of the Hogfather (the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus) is threatened, Death steps up to save Hogswatchnight by temporarily filling the role of his fellow anthropomorphic personification. Not surprisingly, Death handles the job in rather eccentric ways. I especially like the conclusion of the novel, in which the Hogfather reverts to his primal persona as a nature deity in animal form, and only saving his life can ensure that the sun will rise at the winter solstice.

At the end of that climactic scene, Death insists that if the Hogfather had not been saved, the sun would not have risen. Susan, Death's granddaughter, asks what would have happened instead. In his customary all-caps dialogue, Death replies, "A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD."

Happy winter holiday season to all!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Xmas Musings

I've just read a recent book about Dorothy Sayers, SUBVERSIVE, by Crystal Downing. One theme to which the author frequently alludes is the concept of living by an exchange model, an expectation of behaving certain ways to get equivalent value in return. For instance, Downing emphasizes that Sayers cautioned against the mind-set that doing good deeds guarantees one will "go to Heaven" or even enjoy prosperity in life. At the current season, this idea reminded me of Christmas gifts, naturally. We often speak of "exchanging presents" or having a gift exchange at an office party. Ideally, we'd give presents that reflect our awareness of what the recipient really wants, without any consideration of what we might receive from that person. In practice, our gift-giving is often constrained not only by what we can afford but by the anticipated size and monetary value of the present we expect the recipient to give us. If we spend a lot more in giving than the other person spends on us, we might feel miffed at the discrepancy or embarrassed at having put the other person in an awkward spot. Conversely, not spending enough on a gift may distress us because we fear the recipient will think we're stingy, or we might even feel guilty about not giving what we "should."

This subject reminds me of two short essays C. S. Lewis wrote about Christmas as celebrated in Britain in his time. You can read them here:

What Christmas Means to Me

Xmas and Christmas

In "What Christmas Means to Me" (a sappy title I seriously doubt Lewis chose himself), he distinguishes three things called "Christmas": The first is the religious festival. The second, a secular holiday devoted to merrymaking, "has complex historical connections with the first" and, in mid-twentieth-century England as in our contemporary culture, is joyfully celebrated by millions of people who don't practice Christianity in any other way. The third phenomenon, which Lewis says "is unfortunately everyone's business," he calls "the commercial racket." Note that this article was first published in 1957! Here's where the topic of gift exchange comes in. He laments the modern pressure to give presents or at least send cards to everybody we know, a custom he maintains "has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers." Not only is this obligation exhausting and a hindrance to the "ordinary and necessary shopping" we still can't avoid, "Most of it is involuntary." While I think "most" is an exaggeration, Lewis amusingly summarizes the hapless shopper's plight thus: "The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own."

"Xmas and Christmas," a witty piece of satire, bears the subtitle "A Lost Chapter from Herodotus." It purports to be the classical historian's report of strange winter customs in the fogbound island nation of Niatirb. The writer describes the sending of "Exmas-cards" bearing pictures that seem to have no discernible connection to the festival supposedly being celebrated, such as birds on prickly tree branches. There's a funny description of the citizens' reactions to receiving cards or gifts from anyone they haven't already gifted: "They beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain. . . ." Herodotus concludes that Exmas and "Crissmas" can't possibly be the same holiday, because surely millions of people wouldn't undergo those ordeals in honor of a God they don't believe in.

This essay's description of the illustrations on "Exmas-cards," including "men in such garments as the Niatirbians believe that their ancestors wore two hundred years ago riding in coaches such as their ancestors used, or houses with snow on their roofs," highlights the way our images of a "traditional Christmas" often owe more to art, literature, and the media than to firsthand experience. Those idyllic snow scenes, for instance, and the songs about sleigh rides. If anyone in the modern U.S. goes on a sleigh ride around the holidays, it's most likely a staged event, not a spontaneous family outing. As for songs such as "Winter Wonderland," "Let It Snow," and "White Christmas" (rescued from banality only by its seldom-sung prologue, which frames the singer as a Los Angeles resident nostalgic for the northeast winters of his childhood), a considerable percentage of the American population sees white Christmases only in the movies. In the popular imagination, though, December is supposed to conform to the standard described by TV Tropes in this entry:

Dreaming of a White Christmas

As the page explains, "Unless a work of fiction takes place in a tropical or arid setting, or in the Southern Hemisphere, it will always snow in winter. . . . The snow will be there to look 'pretty'. It does not melt or turn slushy, nor is it ever coated with dirt or litter. It is never accompanied by freezing winds or icy rains." While our family lived in San Diego at some points during my husband's Navy career, we could tell when it was winter (aside from chilly nights and increased rain) because the distant hills turned green rather than brown. Growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, I seldom experienced snow in December as a child. We got it mainly in January. My late stepmother, a native of the coastal region of North Carolina, loved snow and always hoped for a white Christmas. Considering her birthplace, I doubt she ever saw snow at Christmas during her entire early life. Yet the ideal derived from fiction, movies, and songs shaped her vision of how the winter holidays were "supposed" to look.

Merry Christmas, white or green, to all who celebrate it!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt