A Christmas Carol

and Other Christmas Writings

Charles Dickens, 1835-1854

(December 2017)

  

Every year I mean to read this book at Christmas, and every year I forget until about December 29^th, at which point the moment has rather passed. I finally got the pitifully small affair that represents my act together this year, and it was in no way worth the wait.

  

He’s not subtle as a writer, is he? Soporific at points, certainly (though this is as much about the influence of the passage of time on prose style as Dickens’s writing itself), but never afraid to assert and reassert and rereassert the Moral of the Story until the reader has been bludgeoned into shame-faced coma of ethical contrition. The most notably thing about reading A Christmas Carol—having obviously been exposed to adaptations of it in various other media for as long as I can remember—was how Scrooge has basically repented of all his sins by the midway point of the visit of the Ghost of Christmas Past, yet we’ve still got two-and-a-half more apparitions’ worth of spectral hectoring to go.

Cake

Look! Cake! Also deadlines: massive stinking honking deadlines. Which is why it's been a bit quiet round here of late, and will remain so until the new year.

Hope you're all enjoying your holidays, wherever you are and however you celebrate them, and here's to great 2016.

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

Glory etc and so on it's a cake.

Merry Boxing Day.

Happy New Year

Yeah, I got nothing else.

In-Joke

That's a marzipan strawberry (this is what I'm reduced to).

So This Is Christmas

 Fried Chicken!

Illuminations!

Santa on a Cross!

Tacky Commercialization!

Irreligion!

Heathens!

Barely Concealed Racism!

I think that’s everything. Please let me know if I’ve missed any of the traditional expat tropes. It is frightfully difficult to keep track.

  

Laughing All the Way

We put up the christmas decorations last weekend. Well, I say ‘we’. I put them up while my wife tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to prevent the kids from eating the tinsel. They’ve been shitting glitter for the last five days, which if nothing else makes for a more festive visual experience during nappy changes.

364 nights a year

...he stands a lonely vigil over the barren Arctic wastelands of his home. Waiting. Always waiting...

Flagrant Copyright Violations

Christmas lessons are, as I’ve previously hinted at, tricky little fuckers. Quite apart from all the cultural baggage which you may or may not bring to the table, the timing is generally a bit awkward as well; sandwiched as they usually are around end-of-year exams and the end of term itself.

Soak ALL the fruit

Here we go again.

Aftermath

My love will laugh with me before the morning comes.

Christmas is over (if you want it)

Easter is the most important festival in the christian calander, but christmas comes a pretty close second. Anyone who’s had an even nominally christian upbringing will recognize the significance of gathering together to celebrate - if not the birth of christ - then at least the communal warmth of friends and family in the middle of a long, cold winter.

Not that that’s what christmas is all about these days, of course. These days it’s a graphically indulgent gang-bang of venal (and possibly venereal) grasping and wanton consumerism. I say ‘these days’ but I suspect it was ever thus. You need, at the very least, an appreciation of the irony of it all to shepherd your psyche through the bruising month(s) long assault of branding, annoyance, and false cheer which comprises the ‘holiday period’. Can you imagine experiencing christmas in a country which lacks not only religion, but worse, any sense of irony?

Say 'hello' to my little friend

This is likely the closest I'll ever get to feeling like Tony Montana.

Please Put a Penny in the Old Man's Hat

Because I'm skint. Have you any idea how expensive making a christmas cake is over here? I could feed it with unicorn tears for the next six weeks then ice it with crushed dilithium crystals, and both would be amongst the cheaper and more easily obtainable ingredients.



And of course, shortly after writing that little screed, I see this, which both puts things in perspective and makes me feel like a right arsehole. Go. Donate. Do the right thing.