Maybe Charles Dickens was merely being twee when he called his novella “A Christmas Carol“, but let’s at least consider another possibility: he knew exactly what he was doing, and by titling the story as he did, he helped guarantee it would become a perennial holiday classic.
What is a Christmas carol anyway? It’s a song, which we know well, because we have sung it our entire lives, but with just one small wrinkle, a constraint on the magic: we can only sing it during a special time of the year. Outside of that time, the song no longer holds the same power, or really any power at all.
I can imagine Dickens’ wanting to employ similar magic for his story. By calling it “a Christmas Carol” he understood that he was narrowing the space on the calendar during which the story would be enjoyed, while deepening and widening its reach beyond any of his other classic tales. (I actually have no idea, really, what Dickens was thinking. I suppose I could Google it, but why ruin the fun of speculating?)
We have a terrible misapprehension of how art works in our current culture. We read a book, Moby Dick, say, and then we think we’re done. “All good. Moby Dick = finished.” We look at a single Jackson Pollack painting, maybe not even in real life, maybe on a computer screen. And we say to ourselves: “Good. ‘Action painting’ = big squiggly mess of colors. Got it! Moving on.” But that’s not how art works. Most art works through the mystical mechanisms of return. You have to keep revisiting, renewing, because each time you do, you create the opportunity for something new to happen. That’s the reward for your faithfulness.
A full engagement with art requires tapping into the dimensions of the sacred ritual and the mystical, even if you—like me—don’t, strictly speaking, believe in such dimensions. (Surely if you are reading this obscure blog about theatre, you have at least a passing familiarity with the notion of a willing suspension of disbelief. Theatre runs on this not-so-secret sauce.)
Whenever I talk about the ineffable effects of art, I always come back to the Hopi. The famous religious historian Elaine Pagels tells a story about a particular sect of that tribe who go through an elaborate ceremony every morning to make the sun rise. When asked what would happen if they simply neglected to perform the rite one day, they reply: “Oh sure, let’s plunge the world into eternal darkness for the sake of your stupid experiment.”
Winter solstices have been coming and going for billions of years before human beings strolled the globe. We don’t make the light bounce back out of the darkness by celebrating Christmas.
On the other hand, why risk it?