This column first appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Dec. 22, 2024
On Christmas Eve, I walk to the cemetery near my house. Called God‘s Acre by the Moravians who settled my adopted home of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, it is as it sounds — if a cemetery can be beautiful, this one is stunning.
This will be my third Christmas here and I am grateful. I walk to the cemetery to thank the founders for giving me the city I now call home, the city we now call Christmas City, founded on Christmas Eve in 1741.
My mingling of Christmas with death and mysticism harkens back to my youth, when Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was a staple in our home. On holiday breaks from school after playing outside, the sunset came devilishly early. To beat back the darkness and cold, I would lie on the living room carpet by the fireplace and read, hands propped under my chin.
I grew up in a pre-Internet home filled with books. I don’t remember the first time I read “A Christmas Carol,” but it was most likely my dad who first introduced me to the tale. We have always had a mutual love of language and literature. Its ghosts and time travel added to the magic that is Christmas.
One of my favorite lines in all of literature is exclaimed (in most versions of the play) by Ebineezer Scrooge after visiting the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, when he snaps back into the reality that is his present day, in the moment he realizes that he gets a cosmic do-over:
“It’s all right, it’s all true, it all happened.”
In Dickens’ original scrawled writing, the sentence looks so hastily written and rushed – he chose commas instead of periods — that we may feel his excitement on behalf of Scrooge.
Scrooge laughs in the next line (“Ha, ha, ha!”) and his delight jumps off the page. Dickens makes us fall in love with that laugh in his next lines:
“Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long, line of brilliant laughs!”
Dickens’ joy continues in my home. Last Christmas, my 22-year-old daughter gave me a small paperback book called “Christmas with Charles Dickens.” It has three essays Dickens wrote about Christmas and one called “What Christmas Is As We Grow Older,” which he wrote for the Christmas edition of his journal “Household Words” in 1851.
It is a meditation on our shifting perceptions of Christmas as we age, and he asks readers to transcend superficiality and embrace the profound values that lie at its core. Remembering “A Christmas Carol” of my youth, and having aged quite a bit myself, I was eager to hear what Dickens would have to say. A lot, it turns out:
“Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands! Let us welcome every one of them, and summon them to take their places by the Christmas hearth.”
We all have good and bad memories that can take their places by the hearth. Dickens teaches us to look back, even as we look ahead to a new year, much like my Christmas Eve cemetery visits. Cemeteries are stark reminders of our own mortality, which is a profound and unsettling experience. Contemplation on the afterlife, the nature of existence and the unknown is exactly what Dickens wanted us to see in Ebineezer Scrooge’s plight.
Thinking back to my childhood I realize that as Scrooge stayed the same in the story, I changed with each Christmas. Now I no longer see Scrooge as a bitter man who acts like a petulant child. I see him for the nuanced adult he is, with a backstory of pain, fear and lost love.
“A Christmas Carol” shows us that that change is possible; that people can become good, or at least do better. I wish I could go back to the first time I read it, not knowing what was going to happen in the end. We all have books like that, don’t we?
As an adult in a world stuck in a quagmire of longing for hope, this aspirational message of optimism sings to my heart. It allows me to look back and tell the child that first read “A Christmas Carol” that, although life won’t always go as planned, like Scrooge, we can learn to help others and that true happiness comes from giving.