A Christmas Carol

I picked up this edition for a buck or two at a thrift shop. It contains four stories: A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Tree, Christmas Dinner, and excerpts from The Pickwick Papers.

A Christmas Carol is an absolutely classic and essential Christmas story, and I surely have no novel insight into it. It is unquestionably the best piece of the collection and by itself would have been five-star material.

A Christmas Tree is an essay in which Dickens recounts various details of a Christmas celebration from a child's perspective, including specific toys and ghost stories. While the particularities of a Victorian Christmas are interesting from a historical viewpoint, the essay comes across as rambling and tedious, especially in juxtaposition with the much superior Carol. I doubt I will ever return to this piece.

Christmas Dinner is pleasant enough and only eight pages long.

The Pickwick Papers excerpts are the other highlight of the collection, full of classic Dickensian charm. While the narrative concerning a Christmas wedding is amusing at moments, I particularly enjoyed the ghost story of Gabriel Grub.

This collection is nice on the whole, even if none of the other stories reach the soaring heights of the titular tale.