What Would Dickens Think?

Chanukah on Christmas Avenue: Raising a Jewish family in Winterhaven.

If you don’t live in Tucson, you don’t know Winterhaven.

This is a smallish neighborhood—in the middle of the Tucson desert—that looks like Iowa. It sports quiet streets, culs de sac, trees, grass, and crazy electric bills every Christmas season.

For two weeks each year, the place shuts down the streets and allows walk-through traffic, horse carriage rides, and—on specific and limited nights— car traffic (sans headlights). It can be cheesy or magical—usually a mix of both.

But this article about a Jewish family living in the middle of this celebration made me think—with our current emphasis on Dickens—about what Charlie D would have thought about this whole thing. Would this be abhorrent or would it be something Scrooge-post-spirits would have loved.

I go with the latter. Dickens, a Unitarian, seems pretty clear in his tale of Christmas-tide redemption that the point is the Spirit of Christmas and keeping that spirit in your heart all year long. If we look into what he thought the Spirit actually was (and is… or should be) a few things come to the fore in my mind:

joy and celebration—with the focus firmly on family, then extending out to friends and strangers
helping the poor and those who need extra help
patience and generosity with those who are different or see things differently from us
Good food and drink (which, of course, fits right in with Judaism which wisely has paired food with every holiday…and includes mothers who offer seconds, thirds, and fourths of everything…then asks whether you liked it or not…)

You’ll notice “tolerance” isn’t listed there. I don’t like “tolerance”—it sounds like a chore, something to do grudgingly—scroogelike. I’d rather have curiosity. I don’t want to be tolerated, but I do like people being curious. Probably goes along with my teacher background. I’d rather be learning than “putting-up-with”. And this is one of the reasons I so liked this article. It seemed that what Gila Silverman found was that her neighbors and the visitors to Winterhaved didn’t have to “tolerate” her tentative display. Instead they celebrated with her. And contributed more to the food pantry in town than at any other food drive—which is particularly Dickensian (in the best ways).