My mother would know, but she’s no longer around to ask.
I’ve been doing this particular part of the job — writing a column of some sort — since I think sometime in the mid-1990s during my prior life in Decatur. I don’t know what year it was that my essay prior to Christmas began to be about some aspect of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Mom was my biggest fan; she cut those out each year and shared them with her sisters. Every so often she might fold up a clipping and put it in a small Christmas stocking she’d embroidered and give it to me the following year.
The question I had asked myself this week was how long I’d been exploring Dickens’ little story, and then how many times has my Saturday slot fallen on Christmas Eve itself. Mom would know.
Dickens’ rich narrative has a wealth of little phrases that teach timeless lessons. In hindsight, I wish I would have kept them somewhere, if for no other reason than to know for sure whether I’ve pontificated on any phrase that jumps out during my annual reading. While “Mankind was my business,” is perhaps Jacob Marley’s most famous line, my favorite lesson has always been from another of Marley’s lines: “Not to know that any Christian spirit … will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness.” My emphasis — each of us has more potential, more opportunities than we have days remaining.
Not so much a new “lesson” this year as a revelation: There are a multitude of digressions that Dickens takes in his narrative, beginning with his missive in the first few paragraphs about what might be particularly dead about a door-nail. He does not use the phrase “But I digress” — but he does. Often.
The best ones make period references that can leave us puzzled about 180 years later:
How bitterly cold it was on that particular Christmas Eve (a timely detail this year, but I digress) gets two rather lengthy digressionary paragraphs including a mention of a Saint Dunstan. “If the poor Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit’s nose with a touch of such weather instead of using his familiar weapons…”
Who? What? This is where the internet comes in pretty handy. Saint Dunstan, it turns out, lived during the 10th century. His lore includes this little poem:
St Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull’d the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.
Another story relates how Dunstan nailed a horseshoe to the Devil’s hoof when he was asked to re-shoe the Devil’s horse. This caused the Devil great pain, and Dunstan only agreed to remove the shoe and release the Devil after he promised never to enter a place where a horseshoe is over the door. This is claimed as the origin of the lucky horseshoe.
Guess what? I did it again.
So Dickens has a little lesson with that digression. His reference to another unfamiliar name is less clear.
When Scrooge woke up on Christmas morning and realized he is actually alive with a second chance to avoid Marley’s fate, he danced about, “making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings.”
Laocoön, it turns out, was said to have been a Trojan priest who, according to the faithful internet, did some rather embarrassing things not mentionable in a family newspaper.
I have to presume Dickens’ contemporary readers would be knowledgeable about these characters. Generally speaking, a writer doesn’t want to make his or her digressions too obscure. After all, back then they didn’t have Google to help them out.
Besides my annual readings, there are plenty of versions of the story on DVDs that get a cold afternoon’s viewing. Mom is part of that as well. A framed embroidery she made for her favorite columnist has a place of honor next to the television on which those DVDs are viewed.
I wish I’d have made a note on the back of that the year she had done this and wrapped it up as a Christmas gift. But she would know. Mothers are like that.
Have a dickens of a Christmas. Make a perfect Laocoön of yourself.
miller@news-banner.com
