I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all year.
These words, spoken by Ebenezer Scrooge toward the end of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, complete the redemptive transformation that begins early in the novel. The sentiment behind the words is credited with ushering in the modern idea of Christmas and the festive vision of the holidays that have endured since Dickens first published the novel in 1843.

Dickens’s last two novels had not sold well. Driven by the distinct possibility of financial ruin, he pushed himself to write A Christmas Carol in mere weeks. In writing it, he imagined a story that folks could return to again and again. He thought he could easily achieve this if he had the novel illustrated.
For the task, Dickens chose John Leech, a caricaturist and illustrator known for his humor and satirical bent. Although Leech worked for Punch, a popular magazine, Dickens found his illustrations to have a certain sophistication.

Marley warns Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts in one night. The foretold visitors help turn Scrooge’s life around and put him on a path of redemption. Illustration by John Leech. Wikimedia Commons.
Dickens and Leech worked well together and had a long-lasting partnership. Leech illustrated subsequent Dickens novels. As newspaper and magazine cartoons specialist James Whitworth writes in the British publication The Conversation, “while many other artists have illustrated editions of A Christmas Carol over the years, Leech's work on the original has given him the right to claim what it was not just Dickens who was the man who invented Christmas."
A version of this story appeared in the Ford's Theatre playbill for the 2019 production of A Christmas Carol.