Ghost of Christmas Present (Stave Three)

     In some ways this chapter presents Dickens’ core message in its clearest terms – his message about Christmas as a key to understanding reality. Just going to make some notes here rather than write anything very coherent. Too much going on in the house today! I apologize if there is some repetition here from an earlier entry. 

    In the beginning Scrooge is still trying to control things – here the conditions of his encounters with the spirits. He can control things in his money house but not in the (real – in the novel at least) world of the spirit.

   A light is calling to him from another space. He has to answer it. In a sense, the whole carol consists of a series of calls to Scrooge to come out of his nasty sinful self.

  The Ghost of Christmas Present is overflowing with the good things of the earth, of Creation. Interesting is that he has around his waist a rusted scabbard but no sword in it. He is pure gift, pure overflowing, full of the good things of the earth. No violence in him. And of course, he is a source of light (love, warmth, cheer).

   In responding to him. Scrooge shows that he has already changed. He freely consents to receive the Ghost’s light. When they prepare to depart the Ghost bids Scrooge touch his robe. This is another biblical allusion to healing.

She touched the fringe of his robe, for she thought, “If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.” Jesus turned around, and when he saw her he said, “Daughter, be encouraged! Your faith has made you well.” And the woman was healed at that moment. (Matthew 9:20-22)

Dickens’ original Victorian audience was of course much more Bible-literate than the present age, and these allusions would have resonated with many readers. But the ghosts are about Scrooge’s healing – a completely gratuitous gift that he did not earn, like life and almost everything that makes life a gift. 

   The long, amazing description of the street at Christmas is Christmas and all the good things of the earth being personified, coming to life and giving themselves away. For example:

…there were Norfolk biffins [a kind of apple], squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.

There are two or three pages of such descriptions, mirroring the opulence of the Ghost himself as he first appeared to Scrooge. "Everything in the world is reaching out to give itself; to bestow itself, and call you in and draw you into an engagement (Lindley).” That's the way the world is, Dickens seems to be suggesting. Scrooge is being drawn into this world, drawn out of his capitalist self.

   Then they appear at Bob Cratchit's house, a microcosm of all this fullness.  The same kind of personification is used: “…the slow potatoes, bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan lid to be let out and peeled.” "Reality itself is a gift that is giving itself to us at all times," as the professor puts it. It is there for those who have eyes to see it, which is to say, for those who have not shut out reality by locking themselves in their own covetous egos.

    The Cratchits are all present to one another. Everyone is a unique someone. It is not normal for Scrooge to respond to others in this fashion. The reciprocity of their presence to each other, giving themselves to each other and receiving from each other. This is what love does – normal family relations, one would think – and this is what Scrooge must be drawn into. They sit down for the feast and ask for God’s blessings – which they are already in the midst of, as it is Christmas. This is when Tiny Tim says his justly famous line: “God bless us, everyone.” This is a form of gratitude as well for all the little and big gifts of life that are just there and that no one has earned. Gratitude is a call to return thanks by giving your own little gifts – gifts that mean nothing to the capitalist but which are the stuff of Creation.

   Scrooge asks about Tiny Tim’s fate and is distraught at the prospect of his death. Then the Ghost makes him eat his words from the beginning stave: “If he be like to die, then he had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” He is a changed person by now and suffers remorse, but the Spirit is forcing him to reflect on the meaning of his words: Tiny Tim is the surplus. And all that Tiny Tim stands for, indeed all the Christmas stands for, all the Creation itself stands for – it is surplus, not necessary, not rationally explainable, gratuitous, free, giving, blessing for no reason at all (outside of love). The whole stave is about the “surplus” that is reality itself (Creation). Why does anything at all exist and not simply nothing? The whole stave can be read as a meditation on the meaning of “surplus” or “surplus population.”

    This also brings in the theme – present throughout the book – of the different systems of accounting in the divine world and Scrooge’s capitalist world. What is Tiny Tim worth in each system of accounting? Dickens clearly wants us to believe that the divine world, the world of the Spirits, is the real world, and that Scrooge’s world is an illusion, a reduction of reality to the terms of ego-consciousness. How the God of Christmas – the Christ child – sees Tiny Tim is the measure of true value in the world of Dickens’ novel.

    Then there is the Christmas theme of the light in the midst of darkness (cf. God is light, John, 1-5). They observe men huddled around a fire on the street, miners celebrating in their dark world, a lighthouse, a ship on a stormy sea at night – all dark and dismal places made blessed by Christmas cheer, light and warmth coming from the people celebrating in them. To celebrate only makes sense as an affirmation of life, of being. I think there are two senses of darkness: one good and one bad. The bad sense of darkness is the world created by Scrooge and his money-loving ilk. Light comes into that world through Christmas, through people like the Cratchits and the others described in this stave. It is a man-made darkness (sin). The good sense, I think comes from the short scene of the ship on the sea:

It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as death – it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to hear a hearty laugh.

Here the darkness represents mystery – reality, the reality that we have access to – is like a ship floating on that unknown abyss. We live in the middle of profound mysteries, mysteries that cannot be solved with reason like a Sherlock Holmes case. These mysteries arise from our finitude relative to Being as such. The world is big. The sea is a metaphor for the unknowable reality beyond our possible experience. Christmas brings Joy in the midst of this darkness. Life itself is a passage over an abyss, a mystery. The Joy of Christmas in finding a reason to laugh, to be joyful in the midst of this mystery – which, as the passage quoted indicates, includes death. 

    They also visit Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, on Christmas. Fred is poor by Scrooge’s standards, but his laugh is his gift, a laugh that rises above all the reasons for it as Scrooge understands them at the beginning.

  Scrooge is moved by the simple Music – an air – played by his niece, whom he had disdained. The same song his little sister used to sing. He reflects – reflection! Something he never did before – that listening to this music could have cultivated a kindness in him. Some music elicits love.  It draws out the connections under the surface of things. This is a deep insight about music, one he shares with Plato.

   Finally Scrooge loses himself in the children’s game Fred and his company play. It is good to be children sometimes – another theme of the book. Playing children's games at Christmas invokes the mystery of the Incarnation: God became of a child – wild thought.  And recall that Peter Cratchit read Mark 9:37 after Tiny Tim dies in that possible future: “And he took a child, and set him in the midst of them.” His audience would have known what follows: “…and when he had taken him in his arms, he said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me.” And Scrooge, having been drawn in, becomes like a child, becomes Christ-like.  The love is connected to joy, and joy is connected to the child still in his – our capacity for joy. Scrooge, who had tried to kill the child in him, has been rediscovering the child – especially in the scene at Fred’s.

   Scrooge is getting what he doesn't deserve (the toast to him at Fred’s being a little symbol of that). That is a secret of the book. Scrooge in being drawn into the light of love, into unselfconscious acts of giving and receiving. The Spirit blesses everyone he can, which is to say, everyone who has not closed his heart to construct their own narrow, reductive reality. You have to close the door on love or you will receive it.

   "Reality is gratuitous" - it is all surplus, extra, over and above what is just, explicable, necessary, - it is added, it is more. That is the message – or a central message – of this stave.  The book offers an interpretation of what reality is and means.