Mr. Dickens and His Carol

by Samantha Silva

It was clear to Dickens that mistletoe and its brethren were being employed to merry-up the town and encourage the buying and selling of things that no one needed but could not live without.

Dickens knew the deception well, but he smiled nonetheless, not for the brilliance of its execution—it was on the sloppy end of magic tricks—but for the truth at the bottom of every illusion, every fiction, every lie: our own great desire to believe.