A Christmas Carol:

Reading this book has become my only Christmas Eve tradition.  I still have the copy I got as a child one year for Christmas, the red covers somewhat faded.  For several years, I looked upon it with guilt: I was too young a reader to be interested in any passages from Charles Dickens that didn't involve children.  So although I knew I was expected to read it from cover to cover, I was an adult before I did so.  As a child, I dipped into it with growing curiosity, in search of my own kind. 

At first sight, it seemed Tiny Tim was the only child in A Christmas Carol.  He had no great adventures involving workhouses and pickpockets, but did manage to do and say everything the adults expected of him.  I didn't know whether to envy or despise the little fellow.

The story meant more when I came to it as an adult, and understood fully what it could mean to look back and realise you have wasted your life.  Understood too the miracle of being given a chance to put right those disastrous life choices from the past.  Yet Christmas past, our past as the novel reminds us, is not to be dismissed.

Reading the description of the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner, I go back to the age of nine, when I first understood the power of Dickens's language.  I can still hear the voices of the final year class, then one year above me, reciting that passage of the novel in chorus for the Christmas concert, at the English primary school I attended.  Encased in Victorian dress, they put colour and expression into their voices.  As I listened, I realised that this was not the only reason it sounded like a piece of music without notes.  It was the writer who had made the harmony, with his choice of words.

 But at that school the teachers of most consequence were those who deemed it necessary to rule by fear.  The residue of the fear is there even now, when I read the words I first heard recited in that environment.  Therefore, the more relevant passage of the book for me, at the age of nine and now, is Scrooge's liberation from his own school, revisited during his travels with the Ghost of Christmas Past. 

As a child, looking at my book's illustration of the boy reading alone, the characters from his books materialising around him in consolation, I felt sure I understood the point being made.  And the fact that Scrooge was getting out of the place for good, not just for Christmas like me, gave me a lifelong sympathy with Charles Dickens. 

I had a greater sympathy still when I realised years later what Dickens was really trying to say: that the young Scrooge had allowed the unhappiest times of his childhood to dictate his life choices, rather than keeping faith with those who had tried to save him from himself, like the young sister who came to rescue him from the school.

So today I still feel the fear and tension of those school memories.  But I also remember, with a reluctant smile, the performance my class put on next year of a reformed Scrooge's awakening to Christmas, and how my one and only bridesmaid's dress did just fine for the outfit of a Victorian lady.  Well hidden within its hooped skirts, I declaimed my lines solemnly from beneath an all-too-elaborate paper bonnet. 

And I have to recall, too, how the joker of the class, who secretly admired my dress, got hold of it backstage and threw it repeatedly in the air, while I nearly died of fright at the prospect of being found 'messing'.  But no-one caught us, and I ended up laughing with her.  The show went on, and I was another term closer to my own permanent escape from that school.  Therefore, just as I learned to do then, I push aside the terrors of childhood and leave all necessary room for the Ghost of Christmas Present.