Genius Dickens even anticipated 2020

The man who ‘invented’ the full-blown Christmas still has lessons for our very little celebrations this year

The annual Freeman Boxing Day Beano is off. Last year, we were 12 at table – and one Pomeranian underneath. This year, we’re down to six. “It’s a bugger,” I wrote to my cousin in (Tier 3) Edinburgh. “A Bah Hum-bugger,” she replied.

This is the Christmas of Scrooge before his redemption. Office Christmas party? Bah! Kissing under the mistletoe? Double bah! Nativity play? Humbug! Last Sunday was our church’s no-singing, no-dancing carol service. It was Ebenezer “Corona” Scrooge at his worst. In a mournful curtain-call address on Tuesday night, the actor Brian Conley spoke for everyone in pantomimes, Nutcrackers and West End shows. No sooner had the Dominion Theatre’s A Christmas Carol opened, with Conley as Scrooge, than the Government announced that London would be fast-tracked into Tier 3 and all theatricals cancelled. Charles Dickens, who so loved to put on a show, would have been the last man to turn out the lights.

We are often told that Dickens invented Christmas, that it was Boz who gave us the bonhomie of roast goose and figgy pudding, of snowballs and sage and onions, of blind man’s bluff and God bless Tiny Tim. This year, more than ever, we crave the full, flaming-brandy Mrs Cratchit works. Every new Sage (no onions) advisory notice sounds like a rattling of Marley’s chains. Sit granny next to a draughty window. Banish board games. Unwrap presents on Zoom. Was there ever an unmerrier list? The tragedy of this year is that those things we need the most – family, friends, fun, all together round an open fire – are those deemed most dangerous to us. But the genius of the ever-various Dickens is that he writes many alternative Christmases, including ones that anticipate even a year as strange as this. Here, in the guise of the Ghost of Christmas 2020, I offer three lessons. Call it A Covid Christmas Carol.

First, pick a different Dickens. Don’t mourn for a Christmas among Scrooge’s nieces and nephews, with songs and forfeits and games and roars of unmasked laughter. Instead, make like The Pickwick Papers. Wrap up well in shawls and comforters and meet at Dingley Dell. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the Pickwick Club stand “high and dry, safe and sound, hale and hearty” in the crisp December air. They have taken on sufficient ale and brandy “to bid defiance to the frost”. They set off on foot across the fields, walking and talking and feeling so light at heart they might almost play leapfrog. Whatever the weather, get your fur-trimmed wellies on and get out of the house.

Secondly, “wittles” are vital. One of the silver linings of this otherwise lustreless year is that we have learnt to be more neighbourly, more aware of the hardships next door. At the beginning of Great Expectations, Pip is seized by the escaped convict Magwitch. He asks Pip to bring him a file for his leg irons and “wittles” for eating. Pip raids his sister’s pantry for bread, cheese, half a jar of mincemeat and “a beautiful round compact pork pie”. The starving Magwitch gobbles the lot.

This year, leave mince pies on doorsteps, send cheese in the post, donate to a food bank, raid the store in your larder. A pork pie is all the better for being shared.

Thirdly, don’t forget Scrooge. As you bubble (or “bauble”, as one writer to this paper’s Letters page suggested) with your Fezziwig in-laws, spare a thought for the shielding Scrooges, alone willingly or unwillingly this Christmas. This has been a lonely year. Remember the relative, the single friend, the stranded student, shut up in their respective counting houses this short-rations season.

Remember, too, what we have lost. In The Pickwick Papers, Dickens looks back on the “merry and joyous circle” of Christmases past. He knows that gladness and sadness go hand in hand at this time of year.

“Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday!”