In his last published essay (in Vanity Fair in 2012), Christopher Hitchens outdid himself, writing about Dickens in a way at once personal, literary, humanely sensitive, and wise.  

Playing against type, he celebrated even the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, albeit on his own redbrick English terms:

By a few brilliant strokes of the pen, he revived and restored a popular festival and made it into a sort of social solidarity: a common defense against the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys and the men who had been responsible for the misery of the Hungry Forties. For the first time, the downtrodden English people were able to see a celebrity, a man of wealth and fame, who was on their side.

He parsed a complex and “somewhat overpunctuated Victorian sentence” and found in it the key to Dickens’ work: a “freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased” that he identified with children, and artists, and good people generally.” Hitch:    

It is all there to emphasize the one central and polar and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do―hang on to your childhood!

And he took an aspect of Dickens that most of us feel as a weakness – our weakness – and showed it to be a Dickensian strength: 

You can forget that sense of guilt you have. The one about being not quite sure which character is from which book. None of us really knows, and there is no shame in it. Probably Dickens himself wasn’t certain much of the time.

These insights were in mind when, on Christmas Eve, my family watched a TV-movie adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott as Scrooge.

I’ve read the story, several times; and I’ve seen it adapted as a play, as a cartoon, as a stage play, as a movie, and as a school presentation.  But it’s always surprising, in the simplest of ways.   Strangely, it seems to me that I manage to forget what happens in the story from one year to the next, so that, year after year, I wind up surprised by the Ghosts of Christmases past and present and future, surprised by the radiant goodness of the Cratchits, and surprised by the wonderfully offhand report of “Tiny Tim, who didn’t die.”  

This is another of Dickens’ secrets, his artistic magic tricks, and one that he put to perfect use in A Christmas Carol, so that the story manages to surprise us – with that “freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased” – all over again every Christmas.

The Christmas Carol with George C. Scott, from 1984, is outstanding, by the way.