Ted Barris

It’s been hard this year. Teaching and marking at the college – with a particularly challenging crop of journalism and broadcasting students – have nearly swamped me. Close friends have battled health problems, so I’ve spent what little time I had left trying to help. On top of that, I’ve found myself shouting at the radio in anger because the “the holiday season is here” advertisements began right after Halloween – they didn’t even wait for Remembrance Day to pass. Finding the Christmas spirit, this year, has proved tougher than usual.

I expect all that to change this Sunday, however, when I go to church.

Don’t get excited, friends. I haven’t suddenly become a convert to any recognized religion. Nor have I had a mystical or overnight spiritual experience on a mountaintop somewhere. No. It’s an innocent bit of volunteer work that almost every year for the past 20 years has delivered Christmas spirit to me. And it makes perfect sense.

At 3 p.m. this Sunday a local group of volunteers as well as the Uxbridge Chamber Choir and the Uxbridge Youth Choir will join forces in the reading of “A Christmas Carol” at Trinity United Church. It’s billed as a dramatic reading of the abridged version of Dickens’ famous tale about the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Some of you know, these holiday presentations are the brainchild of a colleague of mine, broadcaster Judy Maddren, who until a few years ago regularly read the weekday morning newscasts on the CBC Radio network.

“When I first read this story to my four little children,” Judy Maddren said in 1990, “the oldest was eleven, the youngest three. It took a fair bit of patience to corral them. But once we all settled in, and shared the marvellous characters in this enduring story, no one budged…”

Nearly every year since, broadcaster Maddren has initiated public readings of the story to raise money for local charities, to bring CBC personalities to communities across Canada and to help inspire the spirit of Christmas at just the right time. Each year, there are probably a hundred such presentations of A Christmas Carol all across the country. I know. I’ve been part of them right from the beginning. And as much as I enjoy the fund-raising (this Sunday proceeds will assist the Uxbridge Cottage Hospital), I volunteer to be a reader for a very selfish reason. It’s how I find the Christmas spirit each year. In fact, I find it in one of Dickens’ characters – Scrooge’s nephew Fred – who explains in an early passage of the story the way he keeps Christmas.

“I have always thought of Christmastime as a good time – a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time,” Fred says in the story.

“The only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-travellers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys…

“And therefore Uncle Scrooge, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that Christmas has done me good, and will do me good…”

I started reading that part of the Dickens story a couple of weeks ago as I prepared for this Sunday’s recitation. And the words always stay with me. They’re the ones that grab me most each time I read them to myself or aloud. They reach out the most. They communicate the most to me about the essence of a human celebration that crosses all barriers and links all people. To me, Fred’s words are the essence of the holiday message, no matter your faith, belief or creed. They’re the basis of a universal peace.

As the story goes, Charles Dickens was in failing health and coping with a failing marriage at the time he composed these enduring lines in this historic story. And further, each December at that time (back in the 1880s), it’s said that Dickens recited A Christmas Carol publicly in England in order to help raise funds for schools and hospitals at that time. But it’s my guess, what those readings did most of all was help Charles Dickens – an otherwise ordinary man – rediscover the simple joy of Christmas each December.

It continues to do that for me too and I’m grateful for it.

If you need a bit of inspiration to find that Christmas spirit too, why not join us at 3 o’clock this Sunday at Trinity United Church. I’ll get another chance to read my favourite lines. What’s more, Judy Maddren, the driving force behind this wonderful phenomenon, will join me; and she gets to read those most famous Dickens lines of all:

“As Tiny Tim observed, ‘God bless us, every one.’”