Christmas and Rejuvenation

Abstract

Christmas does not last the whole year through. Furthermore, the characteristic Dickensian Christmas barely lasts beyond the end of childhood. Central to Dickens’s conception of the real spirit of Christmas is the licence we have to drop the mask of adulthood and reveal the childlike features behind it. It is not that we each have to reassume a childlike sensibility at Christmas. It is already there within each of us, more or less easily retrievable. We simply have to rediscover it by shedding the hard, dark carapace that forms around us as we grow and develop our self-protective habits. Just as Dickens often describes adulthood in terms of hardness, iciness or darkness, so he often conceives of the process of recovering the childlike spirit of Christmas in terms of softening, melting and irradiating: But Christmas has come round, and the unkind feelings that have struggled against better dispositions during the year, have melted away before its genial influence, like half-formed ice beneath the morning sun (SB, 223). As children, ideally, we enjoy an environment that is warm, fragrant and fluid. It is a brightly lit and nearly weightless world, largely free from gravity in every sense.