Did Dickens save Christmas?

Would we celebrate Christmas as we do today without “A Christmas Carol,” the novella written by Charles Dickens in 1843?

In late 2022, I saw “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” The film portrays Christmas during the mid-1800s in England as a minor holiday. Moreover, a YouTube documentary cited the Times of London from Dec. 24, 1843, as having no mention of Christmas. Nor had the newspaper carried any references to it for 25 years before that.

I was puzzled. It was unimaginable that, on the eve of this most special day in 1843, no reference was made to

Dec. 25. But when Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol,” Christmas as a day of celebration was in decline, especially for poor working-class people. They saw it just as another ordinary day of work. And so, when Bob Cratchit asks Scrooge to be off on Christmas with pay, Scrooge views it as his worker “picking his pocket.”

Victorians, however, did celebrate the day and exchanged gifts during Dickens’ time. They have been credited for making Christmas a time of family gatherings. And with the rise of railroads, they had more opportunities to travel to each other’s homes during the Christmas season.

However, Victorians saw the divisions between themselves and the less well-off as part of the natural order of life. But when “A Christmas Carol” was published, there seemed to be an awakening when some Victorians started to refer to Dickens’ book as “a new gospel.”

Contrast that general 19th-century decline of Christmas with the present. Today in the United States, as Thanksgiving ends, the media floods us with reminders of the coming of Christmas. Granted that some people complain that the seemingly overnight transition from one holiday to the next is too much, too soon.

For me, Christmas festivities can’t come soon enough, from listening to the holiday music to watching reruns for the umpteenth time of movies such as “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Christmas in Connecticut,” to gatherings of family and friends. Above all, there is the spirit of friendship and goodwill that seems to captivate many of us, even the most “humbugish” oriented Scrooges among us.

More recently this December, when I saw my granddaughter in the Black Rock Theatre production of “A Christmas Carol: the Musical,” the experience rekindled my disbelief that Christmas had once seemingly gotten “stored in “mothballs” for many people during Dickens’ time.

(Black Rock Theatre is a nonprofit organization that brings Broadway to Fairfield a few times yearly “by connecting the stars of today with the stars of tomorrow.” It provides elementary and high school students with opportunities to learn from professional actors.)

Because of the Black Rock Theatre production, I watched “The Man Who Invented Christmas” for the second time. And I quickly went through additional movie versions of “A Christmas Carol.” (My 11-year-old grandson remembers the best of them being the Muppets rendition.)

I also enjoyed for the first time the film “Spirited,” a more recent musical comedy released in 2022. Other than perhaps vignettes and stories from the Bible, I’m willing to bet that “A Christmas Carol” is the story most adapted for stage, screen, and school plays of all time.

So, why did Charles Dickens come to write “A Christmas Carol?” Through his writing, he eventually became wealthy, but before the instant success of “A Christmas Carol,” he had three straight flops. And Dickens needed money, as the film “The Man Who Invented Christmas” makes clear. Were his dwindling finances the sole reason for writing “A Christmas Carol”?

Or was this a moment when an author linked a need for money or was it a personal passion for a cause? The treatment of children in London’s mid-19th-century workplaces troubled Dickens. So much so that, after reading a government report on child labor, his basic ideas behind the story in “A Christmas Carol” can be seen in notes he made for an earlier and unpublished pamphlet called, “An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.”

Dickens’ novels usually were long and published in newspapers in serial form. Who can say why he wrote “A Christmas Carol” as only a 30,000-word novella? Did he write it quickly in six weeks for money or the result of his social passion for reform? Scholars will most likely have different perspectives — as they often do when trying to decide why someone followed one avenue instead of another.

What about the question of whether Charles Dickens really invented Christmas? He did not. Christmas is set in the history books as an event that took place more than 2,000 years ago. But did Dickens save Christmas? Many believe he did. There is so much more historical evidence that the importance of Christmas was fading and being relegated to a minor holiday.

The next time we enjoy a production of “A Christmas Carol” we should be thankful to Charles Dickens. Without him, we may have been celebrating the day differently … or not at all.