Jeff Adams

Charles Dickens published his ghost story, A Christmas Carol, in 1843, and created a phrase that is used in both secular and religious literature: “God bless us, every one.”

Those of us who live in Kansas City have had the opportunity to see the wonderful productions of A Christmas Carol that have been offered at the Kansas City Repertory Theater for the past 29 years. Some have made this play an annual tradition until director Eric Rosen decided to roll the dice this year with a world premier based on the cult classic movie A Christmas Story. I think the idea might be to alternate with Dickens A Christmas Carol, but the new production has been wildly successful and appears Broadway-bound.

Most of us have seen several versions of A Christmas Carol—either at the Rep, in other productions or made-for-TV movies. There is also the Disney version, the Muppet version and a Mr. Magoo version. Dickens would probably think those were true horror stories! You really owe it to yourself and your family to get a copy of the original novella or print it from the Internet, to see the brilliance of Dickens’s writing and “hear” the lines, as though for the first time, in his exact words.

As we near Christmas Eve and Christmas Day I want to remind you of the scene in which the famous Christmas phrase was first used:

After the table has been cleared, following a meager but joyful and loving Christmas dinner, Bob Cratchit and his wife gather their six children around them in front of the fireplace. (One of them is Tim–Tiny Tim–who is frail, crippled and ill with a disease that we discover in the story will take his life in a year or two if things don’t change.) Everyone has punch, some in chipped and mismatched cups, and Mrs. Cratchit asks Bob to make a toast to “sweeten the punch.” He looks around and says,

“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God Bless us!” Which all the family re-echoed.

“God Bless us, every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

You’ll notice Tiny Tim didn’t decide to say “God Bless us every one!” on his own. He said it because his father said it, and his mother and five bothers and sisters said it. They set the example for him to follow and make even better. It was a family thing.

God Bless Us, Every One

As I think about my KCBT family, the family of believers we have around the world, I say, “A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!” I now invite you to echo back. In this day of fearful, politically-correct speech, when we are meekly greeted on the street and in the stores with “Happy Holidays,” I challenge you to boldly proclaim “Merry Christmas! God bless us!” I hope you will have a chance this Christmas to pause with your family to say, “God bless us,  every one.”

To those of you in Kansas City, I look to see you tomorrow at 4:30 for our Christmas Eve Candlelight Service.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Ministry Musings, Purely Personal, Social Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.