The third installment in Dickens's series of Christmas books, The Cricket on the Hearth is perhaps not set during Christmastime, but it has the spirit of Christmas. When suspicion is planted in our hearts, it can eat away your soul, especially when one fails to see that some people are motivated by negativity. The wounds caused to mutual trust can be healed, though, and - because this is Dickens we are dealing with - trust is eventually restored and the warmth of love spreads into even the coldest of hearts. Isn't this what Christmas is about? It doesn't matter whether it's celebrated because of its religious background, or because eating yourself conscious and relaxing at the end of the year sounds tempting - everyone should have a sense of peace during this time of year and the understanding that everything will eventually turn out for the better. The ones who use Christmas merely for financial gain or cause harm to others are the misers.

Not all misers will change, but although excess sentimentality usually annoys me, I appreciate the hope Dickens tries to instill in his readers. The portrayal of domestic bliss of Victorian times is an interesting peek to the family values at a certain point in history, but the characters felt more distant and the plot not as interesting as in the previous two. The poetic and song-like prose I enjoyed in The Chimes (1844) didn't appeal to me here, instead the story seemed a bit too drawn out and contrived. I think the general homeliness was what made this more flat and uninteresting, but there was a bit of rehash going on in terms of some plot devices as well. Unlike the first two, this was wordy in all the wrong places and seemed unpolished, and the plot manages to be a mess while being very simple and boring at the same time (the most ridiculously implausible turn of events at the end certainly doesn't help).

Some would consider the Christmas books as Dickens at his worst, but I believe the approach is so much more different than in his regular novels that comparison is futile. Although with a basis in reality, the magical realist elements in the Christmas books place them in a different world, a world of fairy tales where ghosts, goblins, and fairies come to change people's lives. The sentimentality, therefore, is not a negative thing to be rejected, but to be embraced as something innocent and pure. Joy, forgiveness, understanding, and the desire to make your loved ones feel as comfortable as possible belong to the hearths of homes. I may not have liked The Cricket on the Hearth that much, but at least the message delivers.