You sit down to write a Christmas story. You decide to do a Victorian morality tale, 'cause hey, you're Charles Dickens, and it's 1843. You want to write a story about the true meaning of Christmas. You decide the best way to do that is to tell the story of a lonely old miser who learns the error of his ways - from ghosts.
"Merry Christmas. You're dead."
Dickens' "Christmas Carol" has become so familiar to us that the sheer weirdness of it may have been lost along the way. The full title is "A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas." "A ghost story of Christmas!?" Whaaa?
The little book starts with "Marley was dead, to begin with," after which is a paragraph discussing the inappropriateness of the phrase "dead as a doornail," which Dicken's suggests be replaced by "dead as a coffin nail." Awesome.
The ghosts have survived every adaptation of the story, but the creepiest part of the book only makes it into the most faithful of adaptations. Living beneath the robes of The Ghost of Christmas Present are two urchin children named "Want" and "Ignorance."
That is weird, wild stuff.
Now that I think about it, maybe the best Christmas stories are the ones that include some element of danger and mystery. Maybe "peace on earth" doesn't mean as much if there isn't the possibility that there won't be peace - and if the pronouncement comes from Someone or Something beyond earth, it rings with a little more import. Those are all elements of the first Christmas story, after all.
But, above all. Charles Dickens was some sort of mad genius. "Ghost Story of Christmas!"
