"The New War on Christmas"

G.K.'s Weekly, 
December 26, 1925

[To] accept the conclusions of science, it is necessary that science should conclude. And science never does conclude. It is the whole claim and boast of science that she never does conclude. To conclude means to shut up; and the very last thing the man of science is likely to do is to shut up [...] it is the whole point of science never to be in this sense final or irrevocable. Of course, this does not mean that we shall not work more wisely if we work in the light of the suggestions of science, or take note of the general tendencies of science. It only means that people who use these words ten thousand times a year have not taken note of what they are saying [...] If science had concluded, it would mean almost literally that science had shut up shop.

-G.K.'s Weekly, March 21, 1925

 "The Christmas Carol" is a kind of philanthropic dream, an enjoyable nightmare, in which the scenes shift bewilderingly and seem as miscellaneous as the pictures in a scrap-book, but in which there is one constant state of the soul, a state of rowdy benediction and a hunger for human faces. The beginning is about a winter day and a miser; yet the beginning is in no way bleak. The author starts with a kind of happy howl; he bangs on our door like a drunken carol singer; his style is festive and popular; he compares the snow and hail to philanthropists who "come down handsomely;" he compares the fog to unlimited beer. Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any more than he is at the end. There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all his life. 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. Whether or no the visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future, they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly called High Spirits. They are impelled and sustained by a quality which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently lived is as normal and attainable as sleep, positive, passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home; and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells. It is lyric and exclamatory, from the first exclamatory words of it. It is strictly a Christmas carol.

-Charles Dickens (1906)