FENNELLY: The transformative power of Christmas
My wife and I went caroling on a foggy evening last week with the Beall's Hill Neighborhood Association, lots of children and at least one dog. What a happy occasion it was, a totally analog experience in a digital age.
The evening made me think of my most-loved Christmas books and why they touch my heart in a way that technology somehow seems unable to do. I know that the "Polar Express" is available in 4-D, but when it comes to capturing the meaning of Christmas, the images in my mind transport me most effectively.
At this time of the year I think often of John Milton's famous quote, "The mind is its own place," for it not only reminds us that we have the power to come to terms with any set of circumstances, but that this miraculous ability extends to the past as well as the present -- and we learn from Charles Dickens that this power can also reach into the future.
While there is no shortage of modern Christmas stories, for me the best ones were set in the past for the very reason that in the hands of memorable authors Christmas is so often transformed into a glorious time of life-shaping experiences.
Even in a time of pernicious poverty, how well I remember riding my American Flyer sled down the hill in front of our house in Baltimore. I can still recall the aroma of wet socks and the rubbery smell of galoshes. The neighborhood wasn't very nice, nor was our house, but the images in my mind seem to preserve only the frosty window panes, the sound of tires spinning on an icy hill or the metallic roar of a Lionel electric train.
Fiction captures that magic as well. One of my favorite stories is "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas, which conjures up Christmas memories from a time and place fraught with hardship but which in Thomas' hands becomes a place of beauty.
Closer to our own experiences here in Georgia, we have the Christmas memories of Ferrol Sams, the Mercer graduate and Fayette County physician who wrote "Christmas Gift!" as well as "Run with the Horsemen" and "The Whisper of the River."
Another former Macon resident who writes of Christmas in a simpler time is the famous Georgia author Lillian Smith. Although Smith is best known for such deadly serious works as "Strange Fruit" and "Killers of the Dream," her charming "Memory of a Large Christmas" is another reminder that what makes the holiday joyful -- and perhaps healing -- requires no batteries. All of these writers turn the actual Christmas holiday (not what I call "Santa Claus Day") into a transformative event.
It is Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," perhaps because it employs an adult point of view, that imparts the greatest truths about the human condition. Since Scrooge has lived long, he has accumulated a long list of heartless deeds, and he learns that he drags these sins like a chain through life. His Christmas Eve vision is that our true business in life is doing good to others. Most importantly, Scrooge learns from the Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come that our future is not set in stone, that we can alter our trajectory in life, that we do not have to persist on a path that leads to self-centered misery. It is this revelation that alters Dickens' tale from reminiscence to life-altering morality tale.
At the end of "Memory of a Large Christmas," as two of the Smith sisters sit in the growing darkness and reflect on times past and changes that must come, their eyes become moist as they think on all of the Christmases living in their memory. Events may have brought sadness at the time, but though the transformative power of memory, are now all "large Christmases."
So it is with our Christmases, Smith tells us. Someday, they will all be "large."
Larry Fennelly is an arts columnist for The Telegraph. He can be reached at LarryFennelly@avantguild.com.
This story was originally published December 23, 2015 at 10:03 PM with the headline "FENNELLY: The transformative power of Christmas ."