I'm sure Charles Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol" for many reasons, but two of them interest me. They are opposites, the first being want and the second, joy. Charles Dickens was in debt, with a family to support, yet he loved to celebrate the holidays wholeheartedly.

Born into a lower-middle class family, money woes would always be part of his life. He used what he knew about being poor in "A Christmas Carol". The family had moved to a smaller house at 16 Bayham Street (in Camden Town, London) when Dickens was ten. This four-room house is reputed to be the model for the Cratchit home. The six Dickens siblings corresponded to the six Cratchit children, and Dickens' youngest brother, a sickly boy, was called "Tiny Fred".

When he started to write "A Christmas Carol" in October, 1843, the thirty-one year-old author had penned "Sketches by Boz", "The Pickwick Papers", "Oliver Twist", "Nicholas Nickleby", "The Old Curiosity Shop", "Barnaby Rudge", and "American Notes". Surely this meant success and monetary security? Yet sales had dropped from 100,000 copies ("Curiosity Shop") to about 20,000 per month ("Martin Chuzzelwit"), and his publishers threatened to cut his salary from 200 to 150 pounds per month. This did not bode well for his family, as his wife was expecting their fifth child soon.

"A Christmas Carol" was written in six weeks, completed at the end of November, 1843. Accustomed to writing his books in serial format, this was the first story Dickens penned all at once. The book was a best seller, but it had a high production cost (due to his numerous last-minute changes, and to the price of expensive materials), so instead of receiving 1000 pounds like he expected, Dickens only got 250 for his story published on December 17, 1843.

All was not negative, however: Another side of Charles Dickens expressed itself through his love of games and parties, through his outgoing nature. He often criticized organized religion but he loved to celebrate Christmas with playful joy. Dickens himself wrote about his celebration in a letter: "Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man's bluffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones never took place in these parts before. To keep Chuzzlewit going, and to do this little book, the Carol, in the odd times between two parts of it, was, as you may suppose, pretty tight work. But when it was done I broke out like a madman, and if you could have seen me at a children's party at Macready's the other night going down a country dance with Mrs. M. you would have thought I was a country gentleman of independent property residing on a tip-top farm, with the wind blowing straight in my face every day."

And here is the story, including the rich and the poor, the sad and the happy, all those elements composed into a tale which truly orchestrates the message of Christmas Past, Present and Future.