And yet, and yet…
I have such blissful memories of the Christmases of my childhood, first and foremost the firm insistence on going to church Christmas morning. This was especially taxing for my teenaged brothers for whom Christmas vacation meant many parties and a lot of drinking (it was Kentucky, after all, where the Bourbon industry keeps all the wheels turning.) So on Christmas morning hangovers were inevitable and yet so clear and pronounced was the rule that they managed to crawl out of bed, shower, shave, dress and meet my impeccable father in the front hall to go to usher at the eleven a.m. service. There’s something to be said for ironclad expectations when the goal is worthy.
On this Christmas Eve, I want to write again about the plays we performed to honor my mother’s birthday. Nobody wants to have a birthday the day before Christmas and Father made sure it was special. So Mother sat enthroned in one of her velvet tea gowns, sapphire, ruby, rose, the only audience for the plays we performed, often some version of A Christmas Carol. I looked at the 1951 movie version this week and felt—as I so often feel with Dickens—the beating of a very lively heart.
Father played Scrooge and he played it with great enthusiasm. He also played the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the terrifying black-shrouded figure who shows Scrooge what is going to happen to him if he doesn’t change his curmudgeonly ways. Father played the part with gusto, signaling his approach by rattling car chains in the basement.
The illustration shows Christmas Yet to Come: “The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.
“No, Spirit Oh no no!”
The Spirit still was there…”
Inspired by this scene, I’ve been re-reading the first pages of David Copperfield to remove the bad taste left in my mouth by a contemporary novel whose author has the gall to paraphrase that title. I’m reading from the set my sister Eleanor sent me from our parents’ estate, handsome leather-bound volumes, the edges of the pages cut with a paper knife when Father read aloud. This is The Connoisseur edition, number 28 out of 100, edited by Richard Garnett and published in 1900. The aquarelle illustrations, like this one of Mr. Micawber, breathe the light-hearted humor that makes Dickens, even when telling a dismal tale, a delight to read. They are by Frederick Barnard who is shown with his drawing pad.
In this tale, Micawber is pretentious and long-winded. Introduced to a young David Copperfield who is a potential lodger, he bloviates, “My address is Windsor Terrace City Road. In short, I live there.” He takes in David which leads to many captivating scenes.This big two-volume novel—Dickens was paid by the word and made his living and supported his family that way—begins, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
The reader is captivated, left to answer this question after reading both volumes.
But back to Christmas, and A Christmas Carol. After Scrooge’s redemption through the visit of the three spirits, he calls out of his window to a boy passing in the snow, instructing him to buy “The prize turkey that was hanging up there”—at the grocer’s—”not the little prize turkey: the big one.”
“What! The one as big as me?” returned the boy.” Scrooge tells him to go off and buy it and take it to the big, impoverished family of his underpaid and mistreated clerk.
And then we have the Christmas party at the clerk’s house, with Scrooge to his great surprise invited.
There we have it: the redemption we all hope for in the midst of scurrying around and piling up resentments.
As Tiny Tim, the clerk’s crippled son says, “God bless us, everyone!”
[For more on our Christmas Eve performances, please see Acting Christmas and This Writer’s Life.]
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