Dark Days in Winter

After the death of Hitchens on 15 December some people flippantly remarked that he had spoiled yet another Christmas.  However, he did get a dig in at his least favourite time of the year.  In one of his, as usual, fine pieces of literary criticism,  he says of Dickens:-

Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes in A Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.

CH - I am sorry you are dead, if only so you will not have someone point out to you that in your prose you overworked two adjectives - "moist" (here an adverb).  The other one is "fetid."    But also, my December and other people's Decembers are not darkened by "protracted obligatory celebration".  Dickens, it seems, loved walking through London on Christmas Day to see that in every house every person was involved in preparing for Christmas, and Christmas makes most sense as a collective celebration.  It is not like the kind of enforced show that you get in North Korea, but the taking part of something that is both publicly celebrated and to which each family will bring its own little bit of tradition - what time they open the presents or including a dish that a foreign family member once introduced.  

Now your December days were not dark - you earned money doing work you loved and were popular and successful.  For the rest of us dull drones though there is a lightening to the heart at the decorated trees, the Nativity scenes, the carollers in the supermarket and on the streets, the beautiful music being played, the sweet story itself - that of birth and hope for the humble.   You had a grand life, but those of us whose lives are more meagre find some passing delight in these things.   Christmas has been taken on by people of other faiths or none.

So though I shall miss you greatly I shan't miss your constant groans against Christmas.  To bring some brightness of tinsel and decoration in those dark short days - when some of us barely see the natural light -is an act of collective creativity.  Remember, a tradition is the democracy of the dead  as Chesterton, a great Christmas and Dickens lover, once said. 

Comments

[Frank S]

I think you would like to read this from someone else who misses him.
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson010412.html
The piece ends 'I miss talking to Mr. Hitchens and reading him, in a way I don’t miss most others. And I think I’ll feel the same in five or, God willing, ten or fifteen years as I do today about one of the most unusual and disconcerting people I have ever met.'

[resistor]

'After the death of Hitchens on 15 December some people flippantly remarked that he had spoiled yet another Christmas.'

Speak for yourselves, it made my Christmas!

[Rosie]

@Frank

Thanks for the link. That is an interesting and touching piece from an unexpected source.

"I was more surprised about Christopher’s interest in agriculture, but then, in my experience, the English — and Christopher seemed to me as English as anyone born in Britain — seem to treat farming with the same special reverence they extend to dogs and Greek. He once asked to visit me for a weekend on our farm, and was fascinated about raisin production, tree fruit, tractors, and the economy of rural central California."

I'm surprised too about his interest in agriculture. Hitchens barely mentions the natural world in his writings. It's one of the many ways in which he is unlike Orwell.