HAVE YOU SEEN THE CAR AD...:

Charles Dickens: Father Christmas (Robert Fulford, 12/22/08, National Post)

No other writer ever devoted as much attention as he did to searching its meaning and using it as a moral standard and a way of piercing the public conscience. Christmas appeared in his first book, Pickwick Papers, and his last, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. One of his masterpieces, Great Expectations, has a melodramatic scene in which police break up a Christmas dinner while chasing an escaped convict, the character who becomes the fulcrum of the plot.

And then there's all the work Dickens directed specifically at this one subject. In the period 1843 to 1848, he wrote five novellas on Christmas themes, the first of them A Christmas Carol, perhaps his longest-lasting best-seller, crammed with mass-culture tokens from Tiny Tim and his "God bless us every one!" to the Scrooge character most recently put to use by Margaret Atwood in her book version of the Massey lectures, Payback.

When he was too busy to write more Christmas books, Dickens produced (between 1850 and 1867) a series of collaborations with other novelists, notably Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell. He often wrote about Christmas in magazines, including the one he edited, Household Words.

This outpouring of Yuletide prose illustrates both the emotional life and social ideas of Dickens. When he was 12 his father's desperate money troubles abruptly fractured the family and soured a life that had been relatively comfortable. Stories he wrote in his first years as a journalist and author reflected his yearning for the happy Christmases of his lost childhood.

...where 1970s kids speak into the camera about how the toy they're playing with was the greatest gift they ever got and can't be replaced by the car their grown-up doppleganger is getting this year? Am I the only one who thinks the Big Wheel beats the pants off of whatever car it is they're pimping? And, of course, can't hold a candle to Erik the Viking:

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Posted by Orrin Judd at December 23, 2008 8:55 AM