I don't think I've seen it out there as a meme, but you can tell a lot about a person's history by asking which iteration of
A Christmas Carol was their first. Consummate child of the 80s that I am, for me it
Mickey's Christmas Carol, taped onto Beta from some mid-80s showing. At the time, I didn't appreciate that it was only the second ever screen appearance of the already-legendary (in comics), although it did help set the stage for my
DuckTales fandom shortly afterwards. While a number of changes are made for time, intended audience, and the central hook of casting existing Disney characters,
Mickey's Christmas Carol doesn't duck (sorry) its responsibilities when it comes to the story's final climax: the existential horror shown Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Future - a terrifying, yet captivating, sequence for a youngster like myself, capping off a story involving more temporal complexity than anything I'd ever seen to that point. (
Back to the Future only involves two time periods and one alternate, after all.) Using three contrasting visages is
the central plot element of
A Christmas Carol, and any adaptation, no matter how broadly stretched, needs to incorporate it in some way. But
why, though? What does observational time travel have to do with Christmas, and why does it continue to resonate with people 180 years after the story was published?
Even more than other holidays, Christmas is defined through = its symbols, a wild mishmash elements from various cultures, traditions, and religions. While discourse rages with no end in sight as to whether the whole thing is simply a re-brand of
Saturnalia, I think we can all agree that, across the vast amalgamation of trees, elves, candy canes, reindeer, mistletoe, and a bearded red-clad omniscient being of vast power and judgment who holds mortals in horror of his unblinking gaze year-round... there's very little to do with the birth of Jesus. And what we do get of that is wildly inaccurate, both historically and geographically. (I've been to Bethlehem, it's a hilly town on the Mediterranean, nothing resembling the Sahara-like expanse of most Nativity scenes.) Christmas in the United States is a kind of microcosm of the American experience: a wild collection of cultural elements from around the world, assembled into a barely-cohesive morass that capitalism binds and twists to its own ends. But somehow we or (more commonly) our families before us are able to pluck from the maelstrom a few traditions to claim and keep as our own. And because these traditions are both personal and part of a recognized whole, they become common points to join us to the memories of our pasts and even those of our predecessors. Christmas comes but once a year, but it does come every year, and all the commonalities help to draw our associations together - and these commonalities can be practices or even physical items. The memories of Christmases when my grandmother was still with us are strong both because we do the same kinds of things we did back then, but also because we still have many of the ornaments and decorations we did then. The associations my father has through
his grandmother's Nativity set go back even farther. Christmas becomes a space outside of time, yet encompassing all the Christmases before them.
I hope it doesn't seem like I'm singling the holiday out from some innate sense of Christian supremacy, but rather its ubiquity, the sheer prominence in our society and culture... in any culture that celebrates it. The trees, the wreaths, the songs, the festivities, and even Jolly Old St. Nick himself (in any of his various guises) all create links across the years, taking us to people and places long gone - not least of all our past selves. The signifiers give us footholds in our own passive form of time travel, drawing their weight from accumulated history and the power of associations. In A Christmas Carol, regardless of which version you're experiencing, the Spirit of Christmas past shows Scrooge his own past, his own memories, but with the clarity of an outside observer. The use of spirits and/or ghosts is itself indicative of the way the pasts that haunt us all year are that bit more tangible when we surround ourselves with the same trappings as those events.
In this blog, I have said time and again that I don't truly believe in any art being purely "escapist," that rather it allows us to re-contextualize our lives and experiences, our beliefs and our preconceptions, from a different viewpoint. A Christmas Carol may have set the template, but it's certainly not the only story to make the temporal chicanery of our memories more literal. Sometimes it's ghosts. Sometimes it's angels. Sometimes it's a madman in a box. But the reason they affect us so deeply is that they draw attention to something we're already experiencing, something that matters. And as we get older, as those memories accumulate alongside the inevitable regrets and nostalgias, as we have ever more present through which we view our pasts, these kinds of stories become ever more important.
This is just a quick holiday message, whatever form it takes for you, to remind you to take your own feelings seriously, even if they're being brought to the surface by some bit of "escapist" media - because the holidays remind us that we're always experiencing our own versions of time travel, and sometimes it takes a ghost story to point that out... even when its protagonist happens to be a Scottish duck.
- B
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