this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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I like the idea, however improbable, of the redeemable miser reformed by seeing the regrets of his past, and only a monster doesn't cry at seeing the Muppet Christmas Carol, or better still, Scrooged.
But.
Why Christmas? Could be any day, why Christmas? I think it's to innoculate us against legitimate criticism what a shitty and stressful and endless presents you don't need time it is. Because if you don't participate, you're a scrooge or a grinch. Terms they don't use against people who are actual Scrooges year round.
I say, someone needs to make a film about someone being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past (playing with the dogs in the snow and that's a perfect Christmas), Ghost of Christmas Present (stress buying), and Ghost of Christmas Future (no planet).
But that just makes me ... something, I dunno. Maybe someone will have a term for it.
I don't think Christmas was as much about gift giving in Dickens time. I think it was more a time that your family gets to be together. He even alludes to this with Bob Crachit's daughter having to slave away at work and only getting to see family on Christmas. They don't really do gifts in the story, they just have a small meal together. It isn't until Scrooge changes his mindset that gifts start being much of a thing in the story.
Dickens was always focused on the poverty and suffering of the industrial age. I think he would object to our sense today of Christmas being so focused on gifts and not on time with family and friends
Because people tend to remember what they did on Christmas, so the whole "seeing your regret" thing works a whole lot better.
Also, it can't be any other day, because there's no ghost of the April 14th past.
few other holidays are both sacred and secular.
Yet
So who needs to be murdered?
I volunteer as tribute under the stipulation that it is done via mortal combat and that I'll be giving it my all. If I survive well regardless we have a ghost.
I think of so many days of visiting regrets, but I do take your point.
Or it's a day of family and remembrance. The story is not a contemporary one, it was written and set in Victorian times.
While still somewhat mercantile in nature, it wasn't nearly as commercialized as it is now.
More importantly, Christmas wasn't really a THING in England at that point. It was mostly seen as an idle, rural thing, and it hadn't been too long ago that Christmas was banned as a practice in the UK. Dickens wrote with the intention of bringing back the Christmases he remembered of his youth to the general awareness, and it worked.
??? It absolutely was a thing. A huge thing.
Christmas celebrations were banned for a 2 year period under Cromwell, almost 200 years earlier. Even then it saw huge backlash and public resistance.
They never went away.
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol because he was very concerned with the plight of poor people, the working class not having enough time with their families, child labour, and the wealthy keeping all their money to themselves with no regard for those below them.
I truly don't know where you got the idea from that Christmas wasn't a thing, that Christmas was banned shortly before, or that Christmas was a thing in Dickens' youth but not his adulthood.
After watching "the man who invented christmas" or some such movie I also got the impression that it was elevated in the 1800s to being more than just being one of the feast days, observed by some.
Definitely true. It's what the story got appropriated as that rubs me the wrong way.
Yeah, I made a YT video about this.
This year is the first year I am actively not participating in gift-giving. The two people I regularly exchange gifts with are in a tough spot. One just had a child. The other was out of a job for 14 months and is picking up the pieces. I used to give money to my parents, but they are "borrowing" my car and have been for a year and a half, so they're basically being given 50 dollars a day in free car rental.
So why spend the money? I have decorations already that I just reuse, so if I spent money, it would be purely based on the pressures of culture and tradition, which is stupid.
I'm still going to pop on my Christmas movies, cook a nice dinner, and enjoy the day... but I wish people weren't driving themselves further into debt based solely on tradition.