Time was, the Christmas shopping season used to last a week or two. Now it drags on for months. Never mind wage inflation – what about present inflation? The whole thing is like a gigantic poker game, where the stakes are raised remorselessly every year.
How did Christmas mutate into this orgy of rampant consumerism? Step forward the man who invented Christmas: Charles John Huffam Dickens Esquire.
The story of how Scrooge recovers his lost innocence speaks to something deep in all of us, a yearning for lost childhood
It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that Dickens invented Christmas – but like the exaggerations of his novels, it articulates a basic truth. Folk were making merry at Christmas time before Dickens came along, but it was his emotive fiction which established Christmas in the English imagination as the apotheosis of family life, the most important festival of the entire year.
Only Dickens had the power to do this.
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