Charles Dickens was called “The Man Who Invented Christmas”

Discovered Christmas

By Sean Fitzpatrick

Christmas morning is the time to awake to common sense as well as uncommon miracles performed by unseen powers that are part of life

Christmas has become a humbug. Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge was a sour soothsayer for our times. By and large, Christmas is a humbug these days. It preaches peace, but breeds pressure. The ritual of the mall stands in for the ritual of the Mass. Santa Claus is not really Saint Nicholas. The holidays are not really holydays. Humbug! Christmas is not itself anymore. It is a lost and long-forgotten mystery in need of a good, thundering awakening, which is the work of Advent, St. Paul, and Mr. Charles Dickens. Dickens’ Christmas stories are an important (if not indispensible) voice in the Christian observance of Christmas, and he discovered that voice in the most unexpected of places—a haunted graveyard on Christmas Eve.

Charles Dickens was called “The Man Who Invented Christmas” because his writings brought a true and charitable understanding of Christmas into the hearts and minds of good Christian men. Dickens’ tales jarred the world out of the cosmopolitanism and puritanism of his day, even as they jar that same world out of the commercialism and secularism of today, replacing unholy preoccupations with a holy humanitarianism. Dickens discovered the indigenous Christmas—and it abounds with ghosts, illustrating the Christmastide theme of the union of distinct worlds, the worlds of men and gods … and goblins.

As with most things Dickensian, this motif springs from Pickwick. Within the pages of that gentleman’s chronicled adventures is the historic moment when Dickens found his character voice—when Mr. Peter Magnus conjugated himself into the imperative mood; and the equally historic moment when he found his Christmas voice—when Mr. Wardle of Dingley Dell held a Christmas party and told of the goblins who stole a sexton. The results of the former are inexpressible. The results of the latter are immortal creations such as Scrooge and Cratchit, Trotty Veck, Plummer and Tackleton.

Dickens delighted in disparity and the comedy afforded by caricature, but also in the poetic and dramatic attitude that such symbolic extremism evoked.

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