Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a recurring column profiling short stories. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section.

Welcome to the weekend!

There’s a Frasier fir in the living room and the decoration boxes will soon ascend from the basement, so Christmas has arrived for the Abel household. With snow falling and lights twinkling, I think it only right to revisit the season’s classics — today is Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a story I’ve only ever enjoyed in the visual format. Reading the original is a bit like meeting with an old friend in an unfamiliar place; the fundamentals are there, while the altered lighting and textures allow one to appreciate aspects that one hadn’t considered before.

Published in 1843, A Christmas Carol is separated into five “staves,” divisions typically associated with music — it is a carol, after all.

Dickens begins Stave One:

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will, therefore, permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

You can read the rest here, listen to it here, and purchase a copy here.

“Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.” What a visceral and squinting line of condemnation . . . incredible.

The prose is playful and good-natured; it’s evident that Dickens knew his story would be read (performed, really) in intimate settings — in parlors and beside hearths — and he endows the characters with cartoonish exaggeration that is the delight of children and wry amusement for adults within whose minds Scrooge assumes the form of some real-world antagonist — an inimical landlord, supervisor, or president, perhaps.

Lending the otherwise fanciful story a framework of realism is the author’s studied familiarity with his fellow man. As Commentary’s John Podhoretz has noted in the past, Dickens was a prodigious ambulator whose many-mile walks through London afforded the son of an imprisoned debtor many a pocketful of life’s chroma with which to color his stories and produce some of the most enduring characters in English literature.

Just as its characters carry on a presence in popular culture, so too do the themes of A Christmas Carol. Critical of materialism for its own sake in an increasingly skeptical time, Dickens argues, in an instrumentalist fashion, for the need to continue husbanding the embers of Christian virtue and the import of holy days in broader society — extolling their necessity no matter what the government might invent to supersede personal charity; in this case: Union workhouses, “poor laws,” and the treadmill. Opposed to eugenicists, technocrats, and utopianists, Carol is a conservative reaction less to modernity or capital per se and much more to disenfranchised state “benevolence” and centralized power. In short, the plea goes, “You are a man capable of effecting good here and today. Praise God for that liberty and do so.”

The snow is just about done settling into a residency in the yard, the cat is in her pouch by the window, and Christmas music from the other room is chasing the draft under the door. Thank you to those who shared memories of farm life in the comments of my recent magazine article covering Wisconsin dairies. In other welcome events, I received some of the happiest professional news of my life on Friday . . . will share more at a later date. Time to get the bibs on and clear the driveway; Grandma is expecting us at noon for the Packer game, and a guy would be a fool to miss the pregame wings.

Here’s the Last Knife Fighter’s “Mankind”:

Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.