CHRISTMAS ACCORDING TO CHARLES DICKENS

A Christmas Carol  is a novella published by Charles Dickens in  1843. It’s the most important in the series, The Christmas Book.

It is one of the most famous and touching Christmas stories in the world.  It is the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, a man who loves money and hates everything and everyone else. On Christmas Eve, in his cold, dark house,  he is visited  by three ghosts:  Christmas past, current and future. They take him on a journey from which he will return a different man. His life will change forever.

The story of Ebeneezer Scrooge,  as well as pleasant to read, proposes a moral and a reflection on life choices: individualism, human solidarity, openness to the possibilities offered by life, for example. 

Christmas is different every year for all of us and it’s different for every one.

Christmas for a  child is waiting for Santa Claus, Father Christmas (or Babbo Natale!) and for his presents.

For an adult, instead,  is to give gifts, best wishes and love to family and friends

For us, Alice and Martina,  Christmas is listening to our little cousins recite  the poems they have learnt at school, it’s seeing all our family gathered around  the same table  and eating the same food. 

Sometimes we take it for granted  but there’s always something special at Christmas, don’t you think so?

That’s  what Dickens wanted to tell his readers with his Carol. We must live Christmas and its emotions  fully giving and doing the best we can.  Every Christmas we make a choice,  even though we don’t realize . We choose people, friends, conversation, faith,  whether alone or surrounded by light and joy.

“I have always thought at  Christmas, when it comes, such a time of goodness; of kindness, of forgiveness, of love; the only time I know in the long calendar of the year when men and women seem to agree to open their closed hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were the companions on the journey to the grave , and not another race of creatures directed to other shores " 

Have you ever read this book? Have you watched films or cartoons based on this novella? Did you like them? And now… what’s Christmas to you?

Alice & Martina