Ebenezer Scrooge – think or say the name and it is synonymous with stinginess, greed, and emotional coldness. Think of Ebenezer Scrooge and we automatically think of the character at the beginning of Charles Dickens’s classic short story, A Christmas Carol.
However, A Christmas Carol is a story of transformation. It ends with Ebenezer Scrooge having become a generous and kind person whose famous Bah, humbug! about Christmas has been replaced by a love for this holiday.
A Christmas Carol is about a man who appears to be without positive feelings, not because he does not have them, but because he has repressed them. The story is about how the compassion and caring that lies dormant within Ebenezer Scrooge is reawakened.
Perhaps significantly, it is reawakened through his concern for a child, Tiny Tim. In this respect, A Christmas Carol resembles the classic novel Silas Marner by George Eliot. I find it interesting that both Dickens, a man, and George Eliot, a woman despite her pseudonym, both penned stories are about men who have become twisted by greed and stinginess but whose sense of caring is revitalized through a relationship with a child who is not their own. Unlike women, men do not carry the unborn, give birth, or breastfeed. Thus, we tend to associate women with the love of children. However, both Dickens and Eliot realized that men, as human beings, are capable of deep feelings for the young, even young with whom there is no possibility of a biological link. They also knew that men can be radically changed through their relationships with children.
Thinking on these things contributed to my writing the poem Why Christmas Comes in the Cold. In Western societies – although not everywhere in the world — Christmas is celebrated in winter. It may at first seem ironic that the holiday that most thoroughly speaks of caring, generosity, and love should come at this time. However, like the stories of A Christmas Carol and Silas Marner, Christmas promises transformation as spring will follow winter. For those living in countries in which Christmas comes during winter, Christmas tunes us into the emotional warmth we can create within the physical cold.
Why Christmas Comes In The Cold
By
Denise Noe
In almost any context, cold
represents lack of feeling;
winter, the heart without love–
as dead as the branches of
a fruit, flower, and leaf-denuded tree.
Yet in the time of bitter cold,
Christmas comes a-caroling
when its message of generosity
could not possibly be more bold,
insisting we find the love
held within December’s frigidity.
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