Christmas is for many of us a nightmare: relatives, trying not to buy them the same present again, sticking to a budget, and only going beyond the call of duty for those few cherished kin one most needs to keep on side. Could I be forgiven for wondering whether Christmas is worth the expense, particularly in 2022, the year of nightmarish inflation – or should I expect some ghostly visitations this festive eve?
This hasn’t started well, has it? Even as a child I considered the costs of being good or bad, sometimes sending an apologetic note to Father Christmas: very sorry, having weighed up the pros and cons of being naughty, I’ve decided to be bad this year.
As a Catholic convert, I know I must try better to get into the spirit. Yes, Christmas is a nightmare, but as another convert once said of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, it’s an “enjoyable nightmare”.
“When we were children, we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?” This merry line of questioning attributed to GK Chesterton certainly reads like something the great Catholic apologist would have written, having stated in 1917 that “thanks are the highest form of thought”.
Christmas is a time to be thankful, of course, most especially because this holy holiday celebrates a birthday. As Chesterton wrote in his GK’s Weekly: “The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.”
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Chesterton’s reception into the Catholic Church, the “one religion which dared to go down with me into the depths of myself”. Chesterton explained that his conversion was founded in “gratitude, and not taking things for granted”, recognising that life, like the Sacrament of Penance, is a gift “given at a price, and is conditioned by a confession… facing the reality about oneself”.
Curiously, Chesterton had written similarly about another convert of sorts, Ebenezer Scrooge, that great “anti-Christmas character” in A Christmas Carol, almost two decades before Chesterton’s reception into the Church:
“The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us.”
It was the incorrigible “geniality” of Dickens’ ostensibly gloomy tale, an “enjoyable nightmare”, wrote Chesterton, which most impressed itself on him. And it is entirely characteristic of Chesterton that he should emphasise the hallowed glow of gratitude shining forth from Dickens’ novel, even lighting up the road to his own conversion in 1922.
Chesterton would later refer to his life as an “enjoyable nightmare”, especially when, as an unhappy student in the 1890s, he had “hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks”. Revolting against “the contemporary pessimism” of his day, Chesterton says he was obliged to invent a “makeshift mystical theory” of his own: “That even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing.”
Chesterton’s subsequent defences of Christmas were appropriately emphatic, having been haunted by the life-denying pessimism inherent in “the anti-Christmas kind”, including George Bernard Shaw, who insisted that Christmas was nothing but a poulterers’ scheme to sell more turkeys. Shaw had surely missed the point. “Scrooge was better for giving the turkey and Cratchit happier for getting it,” Chesterton replied, just as he, the Catholic convert, came to realise that he was all the better for doing penance and receiving the Eucharist. “Gilbert, this is going too far,” said Shaw when Chesterton finally converted.
Such was the Laughing Prophet’s ebullient nature, reproofs of this kind from teasing intellectual rivals like Shaw came from a place of fondness, not ridicule. In the end, Chesterton’s Catholic militancy isn’t to be found in his opinions but in his jollity. Debating Shaw on stage, Chesterton once quipped: “I see there has been a famine in the land.” “And I see the cause of it,” Shaw replied. Chesterton’s childlike joy at the sheer pageantry of life allowed for and even invited such jests.
“God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” said St Paul, which Chesterton repeated in Heretics (1905): “A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.” While Chesterton may have confounded some readers, his jollity has since gone on to win over the hearts of many miserable souls, including my own.
Despite the recent focus on the apparent “sins of GK Chesterton”, I am inclined to affirm that, to my mind, he was a happy and good man whose happiness has won and is still winning converts today. Like A Christmas Carol, Chesterton’s apologetics have a Dickensian glow that illuminates the world with a great exclamation of thanks.
Recalling his atheistic youth in Surprised by Joy, CS Lewis explained that “in reading Chesterton… I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” Like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Lewis was the most unwitting convert, a “man out of his wits”, as Dickens wrote of Scrooge attending Mr Fezziwig’s ball. Scrooge “remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and underwent the strangest agitation”. “A small matter,” observes the Ghost of Christmas Past, “to make these silly folks so full of gratitude”, to which Scrooge, already on his way to conversion, replies: “Small!… The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”
I shall remember these words of Scrooge as I honour Christmas in 2022. And if we are to take just one lesson from Chesterton’s conversion, which I also celebrate this year, perhaps it should be this: gratitude may, indeed, be the highest form of thought. I am thankful for Chesterton, who made me a fool for God, as I am also full of thanks for my family. While I apologise for being a nightmare, I shall at least endeavour to make it enjoyable.
If that admission confounds the wise, all the better; since, as Dickens wrote of Scrooge, redeemed at the end of A Christmas Carol:
“He let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.”
Daniel Frampton is a cultural historian
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