Saturday Rave: Mr John Knightley's Christmas by Jane Austen.

The man on the till in Screwfix was wearing a Christmas jumper. It was black and white and inscribed with the words BAH HUMBUG!

The man on the till in Sainsbury's told me, wearily, that he was too old for all this Christmas stuff. At a guess, he was twenty five.

BAH! HUMBUG! is a quotation from that most famous of scrooges, a character called, yes, Scrooge, in the novella A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  Dickens has a reputation for having invented the 'traditional' English Christmas, but families have been getting together at Christmas time for centuries, and as human nature has changed little in that time the season has always have had its stresses as well as pleasures.

So here, to hold out a consoling hand across the centuries, is Mr John Knightley embarking upon on a Christmas Eve outing. He is to be discovered in Jane Austen's novel Emma, which was published twenty-eight years before Ebenezer Scrooge's adventures; and, like all the very best fictional characters, he extends understanding, comfort, and joy to us all.

Emma soon saw that her companion was not in the happiest humour. The preparing and the going abroad in such weather, with the sacrifice of his children after dinner, were evils, were disagreeables at least, which Mr. John Knightley did not by any means like; he anticipated nothing in the visit that could be at all worth the purchase; and the whole of their drive to the vicarage was spent by him in expressing his discontent.

“A man,” said he, “must have a very good opinion of himself when he asks people to leave their own fireside, and encounter such a day as this, for the sake of coming to see him. He must think himself a most agreeable fellow; I could not do such a thing. It is the greatest absurdity—Actually snowing at this moment!—The folly of not allowing people to be comfortable at home—and the folly of people's not staying comfortably at home when they can! If we were obliged to go out such an evening as this, by any call of duty or business, what a hardship we should deem it;—and here are we, probably with rather thinner clothing than usual, setting forward voluntarily, without excuse, in defiance of the voice of nature, which tells man, in every thing given to his view or his feelings, to stay at home himself, and keep all under shelter that he can;—here are we setting forward to spend five dull hours in another man's house, with nothing to say or to hear that was not said and heard yesterday, and may not be said and heard again to-morrow. Going in dismal weather, to return probably in worse;—four horses and four servants taken out for nothing but to convey five idle, shivering creatures into colder rooms and worse company than they might have had at home.”

God bless us, every one!

Word To Use Today: absurdity. This word comes via French from the Latin absurdus, which means dissonant or senseless. Surdus means dull-sounding or indistinct, and the ab- bit is there to make the word stronger.