{"id":1529,"date":"2010-11-29T09:37:57","date_gmt":"2010-11-29T16:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crafting-a-life.com\/mamaoknits\/?p=1529"},"modified":"2010-11-29T09:37:57","modified_gmt":"2010-11-29T16:37:57","slug":"what-would-dickens-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crafting-a-life.com\/mamaoknits\/what-would-dickens-think\/","title":{"rendered":"What Would Dickens Think?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chanukah on Christmas Avenue: Raising a Jewish family in Winterhaven<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you don’t live in Tucson, you don’t know Winterhaven.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I go with the latter. Dickens, a Unitarian, seems pretty clear in his tale of Christmas-tide redemption that the point is the Spirit<\/em><\/strong> 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:<\/p>\n