A Christmas Dinner

[bridget orman]

A Christmas Dinner by Charles Dickens
“Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas.”
For all those rendered into a curmudgeon at the prospect of enforced incarceration with family members for the Christmas dinner you can lay the blame squarely at Charles Dickens’s door, the writer who is said to have invented the notion of a family Christmas. A Christmas Carol is the most famous of his works on the theme. It tells the story of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge who is visited by the ghost of his old business partner, the ghost of Christmas past and the ghost of Christmas yet to come. He is given a chance at redemption which he grabs with gusto and renounces his old avaricious ways and promises to honour Christmas with all his heart. The extract above is from an earlier short story called A Christmas Dinner. Dickens’s description of Christmas dinner at the home of Uncle and Aunt George is stodgy with sentimentality and packed with platitudes, an ode to peace and goodwill. You can read it here.

Dickens describes the gigantic pudding, with a sprig of holly at the top and a family where there is “laughing, and shouting, and clapping of little chubby hands”. This short story is one that would gladden the heart of any Christmas curmudgeon and should be prescribed reading for those reluctant to enter into the spirit of Christmas