The Christmas season isn’t just fret and rush with commercialism watching from on high. It may sometimes seem that way, especially in a society ever less religious and ever more materialistic, but then we witness the special bursts of kindness, generosity, hope and love. The underlying message exerts itself, and it often does so through stories.
After all, the power of narration, in current events, history and fiction, is to engage every part of you, to put you there, to give you an experience, to reach sensibilities enabling an understanding that is emotionally coherent. Yes, we need discourse, too, the sort of discussion that steps aside and ponders more abstractly. But stories? They are what we live by.
Let’s start with “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, the 1843 yarn about mean old Ebenezer Scrooge, a bah-humbug kind of guy when it came to Christmas and worse than that when it came to fellow human beings.
You know the tale. On Christmas Eve he goes home and is visited by four ghosts. The first is a deceased business partner warning that undeterred misdeeds will follow him to the grave. The next takes him to the past where he sees how he abandoned love for money. He then visits the present and sees how his self-centered detachment from others is, among other evils, risking the life of an underpaid employee’s very ill son. Finally, he visits the future and sees the son’s death with tears being shed and his own death with hands being clapped.
