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"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again.
"Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
If the Christmas shopping marathon is not quite the way you want to observe Christmas, and you prefer to get back to the quieter roots of the holiday, Isram's EuropeToo division is offering a chance to revisit Christmas in London with the Ghost of Christmas Past.
EuropeToo's "A Christmas Carol in Charles Dickens' London" is designed to recreate Christmas in London as Dickens would have experienced it.
Though we tend to think of Christmas as something that has been handed down since the time of Jesus, in fact the way we celebrate Christmas was for the most part established during the last two centuries, and much of what we see as the Christmas spirit was defined by Charles Dickens in his small, self-published book A Christmas Carol.
Coca Cola's ads created the red-suited Santa. Queen Victoria started the custom of Christmas trees to remind her German husband Prince Albert of the Black Forest where he spent much of his youth. But much of the idea of Christmas that we celebrate today comes from Dickens.
According to Kristopher Jansma at ElectricLiterature.com, "In the early 19th century when Dickens was a boy, Christmas was barely celebrated at all. In his introduction to A Christmas Carol, Professor Richard Michael Kelly explains that farther back, in medieval times, peasants and lords alike celebrated Christmas with a twelve-day rager, glomming the Nativity onto the pagan feasts of Saturnalia and the Winter Solstice to create a super-holiday full of carol singing, gift-giving, raucous game-playing, the burning of Yule logs, and a whole hell of a lot of drinking.
But by the 17th century, Puritans in England and America had all but outlawed these sinful celebrations and Christmas had dwindled into a relatively-minor holiday. It was the publication of A Christmas Carol that prompted the widespread public celebration of the holiday we know today."
Professor Les Standiford, author of The Man Who Invented Christmas, said, "Dickens is responsible for Christmas as we know it. He obviously didn't invent it as an idea, but what he did with A Christmas Carol began the process that led to what we have today….
"The publication of A Christmas Carol added an emotional component to Christmas and changed it. We will never know what Christmas would be like without Charles Dickens, but it would never have been quite the same as we enjoy today without him."
EuropeToo's Dickens Christmas package will set up visitors in headquarters in either the five-star Grange City Hotel or the Grange Tower Bridge hotel. The package includes a general tour of London, or instead a Christmas Lights tour of London in an open-top double decker bus; an optional walking tour highlighting London as Dickens knew it; and an optional opportunity to attend a Christmas Ball at Highclere Castle, the location for the filming of the TV series "Downton Abbey."
The program will include chances to see Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace and the Christmas tree at Trafalgar Square, with some variation depending on the tour options chosen and the arrival date.
EuropeToo is offering six departures of its Dickens Christmas package from late November to early January. The basic package price starts at $649 per person.
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