My family took the risk today of using our Comcast On Demand capability to watch the 1984, George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol together.  Would our young kids (aged 4 to 11-we timed it around our 2-year-old's nap) be able to hang with the Victorian English and slower pace than they're used to?  And indeed they could.  When it was done and we asked what they thought, the first response was, "It was awesome!"  There's a reason this is the family show every dinner theater in the country does in December.

But while that turned out to be a non-story, an unexpected story did flare up, which was how unabashedly and non-reflectively Christian the movie seemed in this era of "Happy Holidays."  Now I have no problem at all with "Happy Holidays" in public settings, despite my profession.  We do live in a pluralist society, et cetera.  I'm sold. 

But the world of A Christmas Carol, nonetheless, was again breathtaking in its spiritual resonance, which took me by surprise, as someone who no longer expects any pop culture celebrations of the season to have any spiritual resonance whatsoever.  (Fred Claus may still surprise on this front.)  The movie's depth and power seemed strangely suspect, as if they were trying to put something over on us.  Is it really okay for us all to weep at Tiny Tim's "God bless us, everyone"?  Not to mention at his comment to his dad in a church service that the blessing his handicap offers his fellow-churchgoers at Christmastime is to be a living reminder of the one who healed the sick and raised the dead.  Is it okay to say that on network television?

And how should we feel about this most-archetypal picture of a redeemed sinner, of a life that changes in such a profound and moving way?  Do people actually get transformed anymore, or have we come to realize that genetics mean that no one really changes at any profound level? 

A Christmas Carol, for all its familiarity, continues to enchant us because we can't drop the hope of redemption, and because our hearts are yearning for a more profound picture of it than those we see on Lifetime Original Movies.  Transformation is irreducibly spiritual, and it seems to me that it's at the core of the holiday season, that the hope of bone-deep transformation is the only thing that makes the holidays, in any sense, "the most wonderful time of the year." 

The novel thought struck me today that, having been a smash hit in the Western world since 1843, A Christmas Carol could experience a rapid fall from favor as representing a dead world that once shared a Christian consensus. 

But, to me at least, that would seem like a loss.  Is there a way in which it could be non-offensive to hope for people of all religious stripes, and none, that they, with Scrooge, could "know how to keep Christmas well"?  As Dickens wrote, "May that be truly said of us, and all of us!"

Having revisited that most profound and spiritual picture of this just today, I can say wholeheartedly: It was awesome.