‘I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” What a striking promise Scrooge makes to the Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come in the closing pages of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It is one that often comes to mind in the early part of January. For myself at least, the question often arises: what now? How should Christmas change me?

The challenge can seem especially pressing in January, by some distance my least favourite month. Although we are past the winter solstice, it still feels dark and gloomy and cold. Spring remains a long way off. Maintaining the Christmas spirit is not straightforward. 

The answer – or part of it – is to be found back in A Christmas Carol. At the end, the reformed Scrooge lays out his plans for moral improvement. He will pay Bob Cratchit a just wage and he will help the Cratchit family. And he follows through: these are not mere words. “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the old City knew”. To put it in Christian terms, he has undergone a conversion. In their various different ways, the ghosts have shown him the error of his ways. By a painful and frightening route, he has achieved self-knowledge and self-understanding, and this has enabled him to map a new life.

When I reached the end of A Christmas Carol on my most recent reread, I was faintly reminded of a passage in my favourite of the Narnia books, The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader. The self-centred prig Eustace Scrubb is transformed into a dragon, and realises how awful his behaviour has been. In the end he can only become human again by undergoing the painful process of Aslan clawing off his dragon exterior. This demonstrates a clear parallel with Scrooge’s Christmas Eve ordeal, during which he is starkly reminded of the tragedies and losses of his early life and the grim consequences of his selfishness and cruelty. 

Similarly, Christmas needs to be a form of conversion for us, or at least the prompt to renew our ongoing conversion. For myself I will try to revisit some of those well-worn phrases associated with the season, such as “peace on earth” and “goodwill to all men”, and ask what those look like practically in my own life. The practical element is hugely important: Scrooge didn’t stop at changing the way he felt about Christmas – he actually changed his behaviour.

We should not understand the spirit of Christmas in terms of the feelings we experience at this time of year – a sort of generalised good cheer and vague sense of indiscriminate benevolence. Obviously it’s good to feel cheerful but “goodwill to all men” isn’t a command to feel in a particular way; rather, it is an imperative to act in a certain way. “Go thou and do likewise,” says Jesus to his disciples after telling them the parable of the Good Samaritan. He wants them to act, not to feel or talk.

Perhaps this is how to overcome the sense of anticlimax that can come in January. The trick is to be less preoccupied with trying to maintain the feeling of Christmas, and more focused on how our actions can manifest the virtues that the Feast of the Nativity embodies. No one can keep spirits high indefinitely, but we can all, by the grace of God, make small changes in our life. The Canadian academic and writer Jordan Peterson coined a useful axiom in this regard. To people intimidated by the long work of self-improvement, he says, don’t compare yourself to others, or to a hypothetical perfect version of yourself: rather, just be a bit better today than you were yesterday. Change one thing. 

That is the way to become the kind of person who not only knows “how to keep Christmas well”, but has learnt – as Scrooge did – how to honour it all year round.

This article is from the December 2021 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.

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