Humbugs at Christmas
Created | Updated Nov 26, 2004
Humbug! Besides its notoriety from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, that word also names a mouth-watering variety of English hard candy. Better than the candy cane or ribbon candy, the humbug is the perfect confectionery symbol of Christmas.
The humbug is what was known a few decades ago as a ‘penny candy’. It’s a hard candy about the size of two sugar cubes and usually patterned lengthwise in thick stripes the colour of creamy, buttery toffee, alternating with stripes that resemble dark brown sugar crystals. The sugar colour and the dairy colour reflect the two flavours in each humbug. The outside is a hard peppermint candy with the sharp taste of pepper and the cold sensation of mint. It’s a lot like Dickens’s first description of Ebenezer Scrooge:
‘Oh! but he was a tight fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.’
Let the humbug melt in your mouth. When the peppermint shell dissolves, it leaves behind a soft chunk of sweet dairy toffee. This unusual combination of tastes, from peppery to buttery, recalls what Dickens says of Scrooge on the last page of A Christmas Carol:
‘Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.’
It’s the change from one flavour to the other, from cold and peppery to warm and buttery, that makes the humbug a perfect Christmas symbol. The simple pleasure of its flavours well symbolizes Dickens’s simple story -- a mean-spirited miser whose ghostly ‘wake-up call’ converts him from caring for shillings to caring for souls.
The humbug candy is so named because, in Dickens’s time (as in Britain today), ‘humbug’ was a common word to mean a fraud or deception. So Americans are wrong to think that Scrooge’s ‘Humbug!’ is an interjection like ‘Oh!’ or ‘Pshaw!’ Rather, Scrooge is complaining that Christmas is a trick, a deception:
‘“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
‘“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”
‘“Christmas a Humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
‘“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”
‘What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”
‘Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug”.’
When Scrooge calls Christmas a humbug, he’s saying it’s something other in its essence than what it appears on its surface -- like humbug candies.
Dickens certainly knew of humbug candies, for it was in his time that ‘humbug’ became used in England as ‘the north-country term for certain lumps of taffy, well-flavoured with peppermint’. These are the words of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskill, a colleague of Dickens, who invited her to contribute short stories on Yuletide themes for the Christmas magazines he published from 1850 to 1867.
Humbug candies always bring a subtle moment when we first recognize the peppermint converting in a toffee. So, too, in A Christmas Carol there’s that subtle moment when we first recognize Scrooge’s conversion. It’s on his first stop in the company of the Ghost of Christmas Past. He sees the young Ebenezer abandoned at his boarding school after all the other boys have been welcomed to their homes for Christmas:
‘Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, “Poor boy!” and cried again.
‘“I wish,” Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff: “but it’s too late now.”
‘“What is the matter?” asked the Spirit.
‘“Nothing,” said Scrooge. “Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something: that’s all.”
‘The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand: saying as it did so, “Let us see another Christmas!”’
This scene occurs scarcely a quarter of the way into Dickens’s whole story, yet the Scrooge of our memories is the tight fisted miser. Probably we prefer to remember the un-converted Scrooge because he is so arch that the worst of us is still better than Scrooge. By remembering the miser, not his conversion, we make things easier on ourselves. After all, it’s a lot simpler for us to change a little -- or nothing -- in our behaviour to make ourselves better than Scrooge. But it would be quite an effort for most of us to change our lives the way Scrooge did. As Dickens says of Scrooge on the last page of A Christmas Carol:
‘Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms.’
In remembering the miser, not his conversion, we become the people laughing at the converted Scrooge, elevating our ‘sophisticated’ selves above what should be Scrooge’s idealistic example. Certainly our first impression of Scrooge lives on as our only impression because it’s an impression to which we can remain superior from one Christmas to another.
By the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge’s claim that Christmas is a humbug is indeed proven correct by the three ghosts. Christmas is something other in its spiritual essence than what it appears on its commercial surface. Surely it’s the deceptive surface for which Dickens named him Ebenezer Scrooge. ‘Screw’ was Victorian slang for a miser, and the soft /g/ sound recalls ‘sludge’ and other oozy words. ‘Ebenezer’ was a given name popular among fundamentalist Christians of the time, being the name of an Old Testament monument set up by the Israelite king Samuel to mark his victory over the Philistines at the place where, twenty years previous, the Israelites had lost the Ark of the Covenant in battle to the Philistines:
‘Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying Hither to hath the LORD helped us.’ (I Samuel 7:12)
The name of a stone memorial is a good choice for a man who begins as a miser as ‘hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire’. When we relive Scrooge’s conversion from sinner to saint each Christmas, we refocus from the memorial stone to the memory that this ‘Stone of Help’ (the literal translation of ‘Ebenezer’) commemorates. The Stone of Help is a surrogate for the lost stone tablets of Ten Commandments, which God gave to Moses, and which signify the covenant that mutually binds God and mankind.
When joyful Scrooge throws open his windows on Christmas morning, he signifies his own new covenant with mankind. The humbug is ironically turned inside out:
‘Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
‘He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, “God bless Us, Every One!”’
So, as each Christmas passes us by, let us wave our hands: saying as we do so, ‘Let us see another Christmas!’ And when, at that other Christmas, we see a boy singing Christmas carols at our door, let us remember Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: In Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Let us give him something -- Let us make community.
Let us give him a humbug. It’s melting middle is the moral of A Christmas Carol. By trial and error, we’ll learn there are ‘good’ humbugs, with the toffee centres, and ‘bad’ ones, which are merely peppermint drops. We’ll avoid the mere peppermint drops, which taste like un-converted Scrooges. But the ‘good’ humbugs are our year-round reminder to get back on the path of the Christmas Scrooge.
During Christmastide, we should pop humbugs in our mouths when we reread A Christmas Carol or watch any of the innumerable movie, cartoon, puppet or musical versions. (The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.) There’s an epiphany when the toffee taste emerges from inside the peppermint, reminiscent of Scrooge’s epiphany that we first savour when he sees his young self abandoned at his boarding school. And, of course, both invoke the Epiphany.
The ‘good’ humbugs are our year-round reminder to get back on the path of the Christmas Scrooge, who every day keeps the holiday spirit that Dickens describes in another Christmas piece he wrote, entitled ‘What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older’:
‘Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance!'
The humbug is what was known a few decades ago as a ‘penny candy’. It’s a hard candy about the size of two sugar cubes and usually patterned lengthwise in thick stripes the colour of creamy, buttery toffee, alternating with stripes that resemble dark brown sugar crystals. The sugar colour and the dairy colour reflect the two flavours in each humbug. The outside is a hard peppermint candy with the sharp taste of pepper and the cold sensation of mint. It’s a lot like Dickens’s first description of Ebenezer Scrooge:
‘Oh! but he was a tight fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.’
Let the humbug melt in your mouth. When the peppermint shell dissolves, it leaves behind a soft chunk of sweet dairy toffee. This unusual combination of tastes, from peppery to buttery, recalls what Dickens says of Scrooge on the last page of A Christmas Carol:
‘Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.’
It’s the change from one flavour to the other, from cold and peppery to warm and buttery, that makes the humbug a perfect Christmas symbol. The simple pleasure of its flavours well symbolizes Dickens’s simple story -- a mean-spirited miser whose ghostly ‘wake-up call’ converts him from caring for shillings to caring for souls.
The humbug candy is so named because, in Dickens’s time (as in Britain today), ‘humbug’ was a common word to mean a fraud or deception. So Americans are wrong to think that Scrooge’s ‘Humbug!’ is an interjection like ‘Oh!’ or ‘Pshaw!’ Rather, Scrooge is complaining that Christmas is a trick, a deception:
‘“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
‘“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”
‘“Christmas a Humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
‘“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”
‘What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”
‘Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug”.’
When Scrooge calls Christmas a humbug, he’s saying it’s something other in its essence than what it appears on its surface -- like humbug candies.
Dickens certainly knew of humbug candies, for it was in his time that ‘humbug’ became used in England as ‘the north-country term for certain lumps of taffy, well-flavoured with peppermint’. These are the words of Victorian novelist Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskill, a colleague of Dickens, who invited her to contribute short stories on Yuletide themes for the Christmas magazines he published from 1850 to 1867.
Humbug candies always bring a subtle moment when we first recognize the peppermint converting in a toffee. So, too, in A Christmas Carol there’s that subtle moment when we first recognize Scrooge’s conversion. It’s on his first stop in the company of the Ghost of Christmas Past. He sees the young Ebenezer abandoned at his boarding school after all the other boys have been welcomed to their homes for Christmas:
‘Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, “Poor boy!” and cried again.
‘“I wish,” Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff: “but it’s too late now.”
‘“What is the matter?” asked the Spirit.
‘“Nothing,” said Scrooge. “Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something: that’s all.”
‘The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand: saying as it did so, “Let us see another Christmas!”’
This scene occurs scarcely a quarter of the way into Dickens’s whole story, yet the Scrooge of our memories is the tight fisted miser. Probably we prefer to remember the un-converted Scrooge because he is so arch that the worst of us is still better than Scrooge. By remembering the miser, not his conversion, we make things easier on ourselves. After all, it’s a lot simpler for us to change a little -- or nothing -- in our behaviour to make ourselves better than Scrooge. But it would be quite an effort for most of us to change our lives the way Scrooge did. As Dickens says of Scrooge on the last page of A Christmas Carol:
‘Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms.’
In remembering the miser, not his conversion, we become the people laughing at the converted Scrooge, elevating our ‘sophisticated’ selves above what should be Scrooge’s idealistic example. Certainly our first impression of Scrooge lives on as our only impression because it’s an impression to which we can remain superior from one Christmas to another.
By the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge’s claim that Christmas is a humbug is indeed proven correct by the three ghosts. Christmas is something other in its spiritual essence than what it appears on its commercial surface. Surely it’s the deceptive surface for which Dickens named him Ebenezer Scrooge. ‘Screw’ was Victorian slang for a miser, and the soft /g/ sound recalls ‘sludge’ and other oozy words. ‘Ebenezer’ was a given name popular among fundamentalist Christians of the time, being the name of an Old Testament monument set up by the Israelite king Samuel to mark his victory over the Philistines at the place where, twenty years previous, the Israelites had lost the Ark of the Covenant in battle to the Philistines:
‘Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying Hither to hath the LORD helped us.’ (I Samuel 7:12)
The name of a stone memorial is a good choice for a man who begins as a miser as ‘hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire’. When we relive Scrooge’s conversion from sinner to saint each Christmas, we refocus from the memorial stone to the memory that this ‘Stone of Help’ (the literal translation of ‘Ebenezer’) commemorates. The Stone of Help is a surrogate for the lost stone tablets of Ten Commandments, which God gave to Moses, and which signify the covenant that mutually binds God and mankind.
When joyful Scrooge throws open his windows on Christmas morning, he signifies his own new covenant with mankind. The humbug is ironically turned inside out:
‘Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
‘He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, “God bless Us, Every One!”’
So, as each Christmas passes us by, let us wave our hands: saying as we do so, ‘Let us see another Christmas!’ And when, at that other Christmas, we see a boy singing Christmas carols at our door, let us remember Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: In Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Let us give him something -- Let us make community.
Let us give him a humbug. It’s melting middle is the moral of A Christmas Carol. By trial and error, we’ll learn there are ‘good’ humbugs, with the toffee centres, and ‘bad’ ones, which are merely peppermint drops. We’ll avoid the mere peppermint drops, which taste like un-converted Scrooges. But the ‘good’ humbugs are our year-round reminder to get back on the path of the Christmas Scrooge.
During Christmastide, we should pop humbugs in our mouths when we reread A Christmas Carol or watch any of the innumerable movie, cartoon, puppet or musical versions. (The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.) There’s an epiphany when the toffee taste emerges from inside the peppermint, reminiscent of Scrooge’s epiphany that we first savour when he sees his young self abandoned at his boarding school. And, of course, both invoke the Epiphany.
The ‘good’ humbugs are our year-round reminder to get back on the path of the Christmas Scrooge, who every day keeps the holiday spirit that Dickens describes in another Christmas piece he wrote, entitled ‘What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older’:
‘Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance!'
