RICHMOND, Va. - There's no Christmas tree in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The feast-day meals vary: cold roast beef at Fezziwig's, roast goose at the Cratchits', a turkey that the reformed Scrooge buys for his clerk's family. Gifts are not exchanged.

And yet, it is in Dickens' Christmases that we recognize the seeds of our own: an almost thoroughly secular celebration of family and philanthropy that nonetheless retains a trace of its Christian origin.

Charles Dickens did not invent Christmas, but he might as well have. His tale of Ebenezer Scrooge's Christmas Eve transformation, first published in 1843, has shaped our ideas about Christmas for more than a century and a half. Dickens' first, and greatest, Christmas book, A Christmas Carol, has been instrumental in the transformation of Christmas from a purely religious holiday to a secular season of gift-giving and family reunions.

But A Christmas Carol is not Dickens' only Christmas work, though it is the best known. In fact, for more than 20 years after Carol, he continued to write Christmas stories and essays - and almost all of them, perhaps surprisingly to us, are ghost stories. (One exception, "The Cricket on the Hearth," incorporates supernatural "fairy crickets" who, like the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, show the protagonist the riches he is about to abandon. Other stories include "The Chimes," "The Battle of Life" and the essay/story "A Christmas Tree.")

The ghosts that populate Dickens' Christmas stories are the memories that we've never quite lost hold of, the harbingers of a future we may not be ready to embrace; they impart a note of melancholy to his happy Christmas tales. All family life is haunted by loss - by the people who are no longer with us to celebrate, by the opportunities we've missed or the bridges we've burned.

Scrooge, unlike most of us, gets the chance to go back and do it right the second time; Dickens' stories remind us, however, that most of us don't get that chance.

Ambivalence about the holidays is nothing new. Dickens' ghosts provide a somber reminder in a season of excess.

Yet Christmas has not always been the celebration of abundance and commerce that we now know. During the medieval period, Christmas celebrations were melded onto the pagan tradition of celebrating the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, which marks the return of the sun and the eventual rebirth of spring. The Yule log, the wassail bowl, mummers' plays and traveling bands of carolers all date to this early period.

The 17th-century Puritan revolution, however, ended all public Christmas celebrations in England. The Puritans objected to the paganism of the solstice celebrations folded into the celebration of the Nativity, preferring to emphasize the life and teachings of Jesus over his birth.

By the time of A Christmas Carol, almost 200 years later, however, a variety of Christmas traditions were being re-established in England. The first Christmas card, for example, was commissioned in the same year that Dickens' story was published.

While Puritan objections to Christmas no longer held sway, however, other objections remained.

Like some other Victorian writers and thinkers, Dickens saw utilitarian businessmen as the new puritanical threat to England: The utilitarian's emphasis on facts (often translated into an emphasis on cash) led - like the Puritans' rejection of ornament and celebration - to a joyless suppression of imagination, and finally a dangerous rejection of the life of the spirit.

Ebenezer Scrooge offers a caricature of Puritan objections to Christmas as he argues not on religious grounds but on economic ones.

Christmas is "humbug" because he can't convert it into a cash value, can't see the point of a celebration without a profit motive.

Scrooge hates Christmas because he can't figure out how to make money from it.

(Alas, contemporary Scrooges have now found the profit motive in Christmas: How many catalogs have you thrown away this season? How much money have you spent?)

Ironically, by helping to reinvent Christmas as a secular celebration, Dickens may have assisted in commercializing the season, as well. Today's Scrooge might still resent giving Christmas off, but he'd make up for it by working his retail clerks until midnight Christmas Eve - enabling last-minute shopping - and bringing them in the day after Christmas to process returns.

Dickens punishes his latter-day Puritan with a vision of his life without love, without imagination, without hope. In three visions of Christmas, Scrooge revisits his past and recalls the importance of family and friends to his happy childhood. He sees, in the present, the warmth and love that infuse the Cratchit household despite their poverty, and the scorn his nephew - son of his beloved deceased sister - feels for Scrooge in his emotional impoverishment.

Finally, in his vision of the future he witnesses his own unmourned death and the death of Tiny Tim, the weakest and most loving of the Cratchits. His spiritual odyssey re-enacts the Christian journey from birth to death and rebirth, without ever mentioning Bethlehem or Mary or the infant Savior. Instead, Scrooge undergoes a secular conversion and establishes Christmas once again: a Christmas of family celebration and feasting, good works and good food.

It's a Christmas we all recognize, though, like Scrooge, we may find it more in our past than our present. Dickens' present to us, then, is this glimpse of a childlike pleasure in Christmas, a pleasure we may, like Scrooge, carry forward into our adult lives.

But Dickens' pleasure in the season is not without its attendant pains; while Scrooge gets the chance to redeem himself, not all of Dickens' Christmas characters do.

Far more typical, perhaps, is Pip of Great Expectations, whose Christmas dinner is pure torture for him. Pip, an orphan child being raised by his sister and brother-in-law, has just been accosted in a graveyard by a convict. Terrified, Pip has stolen food to feed the man. He spends much of Christmas dinner fearing that his theft will be discovered, and the rest of it listening to his Uncle Pumblechook discourse on his (that is, Pip's) sinfulness, his ingratitude and even his surprising resemblance to the Christmas dinner, a roast pig.

His brother-in-law, Joe, surreptitiously ladles extra gravy onto Pip's plate at each attack; poor Pip almost suffocates in an agony of guilt and gravy, interrupted only by the arrival of the police, searching for the escaped convict.

Ghosts, graveyards, gravy; convicts and Cratchits - Christmas is all these things to Dickens. Scrooge's childlike pleasure is balanced by the real child's pain; the adult's regrets are redeemed by his turn to the present, and to presents.

Freely admitting the mixed emotions with which we all confront our Christmases, Dickens reinvented the season we celebrate now.

Elisabeth Gruner is associate professor of English and women's studies at the University of Richmond (Va.). She wrote this article for the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Va. She can be reached at egrunerrichmond.edu.