If Charles Dickens had combined his own capacity for overwrought emotional fantasy with H.G. Wells’s talent for speculative fiction, A Christmas Carol might have come close to foreshadowing the maddening ghastliness that Englishmen like me have been obliged to suffer since childhood.
Enterprise and inventiveness perverted for profit, ever brighter lights and ever louder noise, Mammon ascending on one side of the funicular while Christ sinks on the other - these have been the distinguishing features of Christmas beyond the doors of my various family homes and churches these sixty years. In all its public manifestations it has become a festival that only the godless can truly enjoy, while the twin demons of retail and broadcasting have made glowering Scrooges of the faithful.
