[If I had my way, any idiot that goes about saying merry commerce would be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart, so to speak. Here's another, perhaps more illuminating, take on Christmas through the years:]
Ghost of Christmas Past Haunts Today’s Work Force
by Nicholas von Hoffman
... Until Christmas was transformed in the 1830’s and 40’s, it was not unlike Mardi Gras. Men dressed as women and vice versa; off-key, discordant, squeaky, tub-thumping bands marched through the streets; liquored-up groups of revelers would force their way into the households of honest burghers to demand money, food and drink. When they managed to get what they came for, it wasn’t Christmas alms or charity, but something close to extortion—the same begging by menace that New Yorkers, prior to Rudolph Giuliani’s administration, used to have to put up with. These bands of not-so-merry makers would stand in front of homes and wassail those inside with such songs as this:
We’ve come here to claim our right …
And if you don’t open your door
We will lay you flat upon the floor.
... [A]lthough tree and Claus were important elements in shaping the commercial horror that is the modern American Christmas, it was the work of three writers who tamed the holiday and converted it into the form we recognize today. The first was Washington Irving, whose description of Squire Bracebridge in The Sketch Book making Christmas in the ancient (if largely fictitious) way seems to have had a great effect on the nascent middle-class American reader. Next came Clement Clarke Moore, a crusty, slave-owning reactionary who opposed abolitionism, and his relentlessly anapestic "A Visit from St. Nicholas"—or, as it is better known these days, "The Night Before Christmas." Finally, Charles Dickens did the rest when, in 1843, he gave us A Christmas Carol. For enduring impact, nothing compares with it, not even the Christian Bible (a document whose connection with the American way of Christmas demands a reach of the imagination): The sacred writing for this holiday was supplied by Dickens, who, given his antipathies for the uptrodden, might not welcome how his tale seems to have become propaganda for the rich. The message conveyed by the story in 2004—even though it doesn’t reflect the author’s intent—is that the best course is to stay cheerful and pray.
Look at the Cratchets. Without health insurance, their best-beloved child is a sickly cripple. Like millions of Americans in the same fix, the parents worry about their child, but the last thing on God’s green earth to occur to them is that a society which lets little boys waste and die is one asking for a few adjustments. In the first half of the 19th century, the time of William Blake’s "satanic mills," no money was available for public medicine. Extra capital in that epoch was being spent on new factories and technologies. As things worked out, those profits became seed corn for today’s wealth and a society that does have enough money to attend to the medical needs of sickly youngsters—if the people have the means to pay.
Bob Cratchet is the precursor of the office-working armies to come. Like his white-collar successors, Bob is powerless against any petty cruelty or wage cut that his employer inflicts on him. He can’t tell Scrooge to "Take this job and shove it," since he is living from paycheck to paycheck; he has no back-up resources, no power to defend himself. No law, no union, no professional association will intervene if Scrooge decides to can him. He and his little family are alone, utter isolates. Read in our time, A Christmas Carol counsels that Bob should work harder, grovel more enthusiastically, and throw himself ever more into the work of making a profit for an employer who is not going to share the extra money with the ever-pleasant, obsequious bookkeeper scratching away in the ledgers in the next room.
In the end, the long hours in the cold and the sweet optimism of the almost saintly naïf (or, if you will, the sucker) pay off: Scrooge has a nightmare in which it is revealed to his miserly self how cruelly he has treated poor Cratchet, whose faithful obedience could not even be found in an adoring dog. We know the rest of the story. It’s New York’s 100 Neediest Cases writ large. The Christmas goose and other goodies arrive at the Cratchet house, where Tiny Tim in his modest gratitude brings tears to our eyes.
Whatever the dark origins of Christmas in the Roman feast of Saturn, this is a tale of Christian virtues being rewarded. For the humble, the obedient, the happy striver, the dependent thinker, the cheerleader and the cheer follower, the possibility exists that those with power and money will have a bad dream, wake up and do right by those whom they employ.
It may have taken a couple of hundred years, but the starch has been purged from Christmas. No more bricks through the windows: The mobs of long ago have become the agitated shoppers of today, the office-party lechers, the Yuletide hysterics going further into debt to achieve a sparkly Christmas, for all is right and all is well, and the lesson of the day is trust to charity and the kindness of billionaires.
<http://www.observer.com/pages/observer.asp>
Carl