"Every idiot who goes around with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding" After reading A Christmas Carol, the notoriously reculsive Thomas Carlyle was 'seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality' and threw not one but two Christmas dinner parties. The impact of the story may not always have been so dramatic but, along with Dickens's other Christmas writings, it has had a lasting and significant influence upon our ideas about the Christmas spirit, and about the season as a time for celebration, charity and memory.