c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ One hundred and fifty-five years ago, Christmas was in crisis. A holiday celebrated in the castles and great halls of medieval England was slowly being eroded by urbanization. That is, until the year Charles Dickens came along with a lively tale of ghosts and greed that changed it all.

Since the first day it appeared in London bookshops in 1843, an elegant red hardcover volume with gilt-edged pages, Dickens'”A Christmas Carol: Being A Ghost Story for Christmas”became part of the collective consciousness of an era yearning for a way to define the holiday. “There are people that go so far as to say that Dickens invented Christmas,”said Paul Davis, a former professor at the University of New Mexico and the author of”The Life and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge.” Scrooge is now over a century-and-a-half old. The same is true for Tiny Tim and his legendary cry of,”God bless us, every one.”But age has not hardened the joints of Dickens’ legendary masterpiece, now known simply as”A Christmas Carol.”In its many forms _ novel, stage play, movie, television production, animation _ the tale is more popular today than ever.”The Carol is about people who are poor, the homeless _ all the issues that are just as current today as when Charles Dickens wrote the play,”said Frankie Hewitt, producing artistic director at Washington’s Ford’s Theatre, which annually stages a renowned production of the play.”The human condition does not change all that much; we just have to be reminded of who we should want to be or who we should strive to be.” No other nation has embraced the tale of stone-hearted old Scrooge more than the United States. In a land forged of optimism and changes of fortune, generations have been attracted to the story of a crotchety miser and his Christmas transformation.

From Disney’s animated character Scrooge McDuck, to the ghost of Christmas Past haunting the hit teeny-bopper television show”Buffy the Vampire Slayer,”adaptations of Dickens’ creation abound.”The Carol is 10 times more popular in America than it is in England. In England, the Carol is just a story. In America the Carol is Christmas,”said Charles Dickens’ great-great-grandson, Gerald Charles Dickens, an actor living in Sussex, England.

Each year Gerald Charles Dickens tours America in a one-man production of”A Christmas Carol”in which he plays all 26 parts. Using his famous ancestor’s original podium, he offers a somewhat shorter version of the original three-hour production with which Dickens captivated Victorian England.

Gerald Charles Dickens said the story sometimes upsets religious hard-liners who want a baby Jesus in every Christmas production. But he suggested that Jesus’ absence from the Dickens tale may be the work’s greatest strength.

The story”is everything that Christmas should be without getting tied into a particular religion or race,”said the 35-year-old Dickens, whose stern features bear an uncanny resemblance to the man who in his day was called”Father Christmas.””America is such a multi-cultural and multi-racial society that the Christmas Carol holds up the meaning of Christmas without becoming denominational,”he said.

The executive director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, known for its production of”A Christmas Carol,”voiced similar beliefs. The play”is not really a Christian piece but a spiritual piece _ a spiritual piece of art,”said Roche Shulfer.”It deals with themes like love and values that are or should be basic to our lives. It is sort of like the Christmas Carol gets at the core … life-affirming spirit in all of us, and it does it without preaching from a pulpit,”he said.

The Dickens classic is in its 20th year at Ford’s Theatre and has become as much a landmark as the infamous playhouse, the site of President Lincoln’s assassination. This long run was interrupted briefly in the mid-1980s when the theater broke with tradition and offered a different play for the Christmas season. The public was incensed. “People would stop me in the street in July and tell me that I somehow ruined their Christmas!”said Ford’s Hewitt.”People would approach me and say, `I didn’t get tickets last year and I promised my wife that I would get them this year _ but you didn’t do the show!'” The degree of loyalty to the play astonished Hewitt, who promptly commissioned a new adaptation and returned”A Christmas Carol”to Ford’s, where it plays to more than 36,000 people a year.

Part of that loyalty stems from the play being a family event. Parents do not drop their kids off to see”A Christmas Carol”; they go with them and enjoy it together.

The enthusiasm is not only for the play’s value as entertainment. Parents want to expose their children to the messages of the work, said Hewitt.”If a parent just says to a child, you ought to share and you ought to be good, that is a lecture,”she said.”But if you see a play where the people who do that are the happiest … it is not preachy.” That message has made Dickens’ work a holiday tradition _ even a sacred tradition for many.

The Carol”ultimately deals with subject matter that is essential _ it strikes at the very essence of being a human being,”said David Bell, who wrote the Ford’s Theatre’s new adaptation, now in its 11th year.

The play”deals with redemption, it deals with loss and regret and concepts of family and the need for family. It does really deal with life and death _ and it asks the question that I think haunts every one of us: When we die, what will be our legacy?” Like many, Bell, who returns to Ford’s every year to direct its Christmas Carol production, believes the issues raised by Dickens are important and worth regular examination.”The thing that surprised me is that it taught me, and has taught me every year. I realize that as I am currently approaching 50, that the show has much more resonance about growing old and about looking back on your life and what your past means to you. It talks to you in a different way as you grow older. The show reveals a different kind of wisdom to you _ although it was always there to be discovered,”said Bell.

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Perhaps no one knows the value of revisiting”A Christmas Carol”better than Ira David Wood III. Not only did the North Carolina actor and director pen a musical adaptation of the play, he also has cast himself as Scrooge for the past 24 years.

Wood’s adaptation relies heavily on audience participation and contemporary references _ this year it mentions the blockbuster film”Titanic”and Monica Lewinsky of White House scandal fame.

Although accessible and punchy, his work is serious business. In fact, Wood describes it as a religious ministry. To experience”A Christmas Carol”is part of preparing the soul for Christmas, according to Wood. “Christmas is supposed to be a wonderful and loving time. But it is not. Christmas is a stressful time! Your house is never clean enough and there is always a present under the tree from someone who you have not bought a present for,”he said.”I try to tell people, relax a little, enjoy the people that you are around,”he said.”If you work through it, if you blow the carbon out of your pipes, then you can go into Christmas.” Wood returns annually to Raleigh’s Memorial Auditorium to perform”A Christmas Carol.”Wood and his all-volunteer cast put on 17 performances each year that attract 40,000 persons. The 51-year-old actor said revisiting the play each Christmas leaves him fulfilled.

After a show,”you just have to go home feeling light because you know that you are part of a ministry,”he said.

In Minnesota, Ben Schnickel’s high school class is no less enthralled with”A Christmas Carol.”The 16-year-old from Minneapolis’ South High, who hopes someday to become a professional actor, cut to the quick of the story’s power.”It is just such a simple and touching play, and one that you can see over and over”said Schnickel.”It is a play that _ if you think about it _ offers so much that you can learn from.” IR END ROCKWOOD