Inventing Christmas

The Man Who Invented Christmas, which I watched last night, will probably not rank as anyone's favorite Christmas movie. While entertaining enough to watch once, it is not the kind of movie one watches willingly in whole or in part every December, as is the case for so many people with It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story or even Love Actually.

The film tells of Charles Dickens's struggle to write A Christmas Carol on a tight deadline and how that book turned a relatively minor holiday, at least in England, into the month-long celebration that it is today and also how the tradition of increased charitable giving at Christmas began.

Yet what I found most fascinating was what the movie, based on the book by Les Standiford, shows about the writing process.

Dickens, the movie tells us, had had three flops in a row and was desperate for a book that would reverse his fortunes. (I am now in the middle of one of those "flops," Nicholas Nickleby, and I find it amazing that such an entertaining novel could have failed to appeal to his readers.) It was already late in the year, so Dickens faced enormous pressure to get even a short book in print before Christmas.

Ideas came to Dickens from everywhere. He met a man named Marley. He overheard an Irish maid tell his children a Christmas ghost story. He encountered a miser. He had nightmares about his boyhood when his father was sent to debtor's prison. Any good piece of writing, even a newspaper story or a school essay, needs multiple sources. It is in the melding of those bits of inspiration that creativity lies.

Dickens says at one point that when he finds the right name, a character comes alive to him, which is exactly what happens when he settles on Scrooge as the name of his miser. Scrooge himself, played by Christopher Plummer, appears in the room and starts conversing with him. Soon other characters join the discussion, guiding him to the resolution of his plot.

Perhaps the most important contribution to the story comes from that Irish maid, who insists that because it's a Christmas story, Tiny Tim cannot die and Scrooge can change. Today every Christmas story has a positive ending, just another way in which Charles Dickens invented Christmas.