Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (dramatic version) is a sell-out again this year at the Folkoperan in Stockholm, performed in English and with the text interspersed with English carols. We took Kajsa’s family to it this afternoon – my Christmas present to them. Bodil (5 years old) had to leave when the really scary ghosts came on, but otherwise it went down well. Apparently it was Dickens, plus Price Albert, who more or less invented the English Christmas – the ‘Merry’ version of it, anyway. And it doesn’t need to be overly religious. What it’s celebrating runs deeper and more pagan-ish than that.

This version included that grand old socialist carol, ‘It’s the rich that gets the pleasure, it’s the poor that gets the blame’. I’m sure Dickens would approve. He was a Conservative, of course, but that was before effective political socialism in Britain, and when Conservatives were the ones protesting the Liberal ‘free market’, from a paternalist point of view. I might have been a Tory in Dickens’s time.