DECEMBER 4, 2024 – Last night before bedtime—our granddaughter’s, not mine—I read from Stave I of A Christmas Carol. Few if any works of literature composed in English have enjoyed such broad and lasting popularity as C.D.’s book of the season. Compact—especially for Dickens—and impactful, it’s a tale that I appreciate ever more as I age. Now that our nine-year-old granddaughter is hooked on the story, I’m in seventh heaven—one of life’s greatest pleasures is reading a book you love to a grandchild you love.
Today on the drive to school I asked her how she liked the reading last night. “I really liked it,” she said. Her words made me smile, for she’s not bashful about expressing her opinions—negative and positive—to my wife and me when it comes to food, art, music or . . . books. The idea of reading A Christmas Carol to Illiana surfaced when among the bookshelves at my sister and brother-in-law’s apartment I came across a facsimile edition of the manuscript from the Pierpont Morgan Library. I took my brother-in-law at his words when he saw me pore over the book and said, “Help yourself to anything you like. We’re at a stage where we should be getting rid of more books than we acquire.”
When I was four, my dad read the entire story aloud to our family. It was serial-project, I know, reserved for a string of evenings following supper. We’d gather in the living room by the fireplace, and my sisters (except the youngest, who was just over a year old), mother and I would listen intently while Dad read the immortal story. As revealed throughout his life, Dad was a Dickens fan, and though he loved literature generally, I think his fondness for “the Boz” might have been rooted in my great-great grandmother’s enthusiasm for the English novelist. Dad told me that based on a reliable source—his mother, who heard if from her mother—that Dad’s great-grandmother, who lived on the family farm called Husjönäs near the village of Häradsbäck in the Swedish province of Småland, would rush to the post box to snatch the newspaper carrying the latest installment of a Dickens novel.
In any event, though every Yuletide brings A Christmas Carol to life, this year the special edition I found at the abode of my sister (the one who was only a baby when Dad read it to the family) and her husband, inspired me to read it to Illiana starting on our first evening back in Minnesota.
Dad would be pleased (as would my great-great-grandmother, I’m sure) with my effort, but what’s of far greater significance is that 181 years after its publication, our granddaughter is as smitten by this treasure of Victorian literature as were her distant ancestors.
Why is this important? It’s a question that applies to everything that my wife and I do with intention in the life of this observant, curious and big-hearted little girl who spends time under our wings; just as so many grandparents do with their grandchildren. I think at base, it’s related to our survival instinct. It’s an instinctive desire to provide for the future that extends beyond the limits of our own earthly existence. In less time than it takes old fallen trees to become one with the soil, our direct impacts, our discrete influences will fade from the canvas. Yet, our footprints—actual and figurative—will join billions more to shape the future. If we can’t foretell what will follow us, I think that we’re programmed to want good things to prevail for humanity.
What better to serve our desire for a better world ahead than to share with the heart and mind of a child, the prose and lessons of A Christmas Carol?
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
