Covid cases spiking. Mass evictions looming. Restaurants shuttering. Families isolating. It's hard to imagine a bleaker backdrop to the Christmas season than this set of cascading crises disrupting so many of our holiday traditions.

The sharp economic downturn in the United States, combined with widespread uncertainty for many workers, has tightened budgets, while the pandemic has scuttled the usual array of parties and gatherings that clutter calendars every December. Even the promise of a stretch of days away from work, typically a welcome relief for families scattered by long days apart while at work or school, seems more oppressive than usual for people who have already been huddled together for months, locked in a routine of relentless sameness.

This may well be the most crisis-bound Christmas of most people's lives. And yet, if cultural history is any guide, no holiday is more prepared to meet our muddle of frustration and worry. Christmas, a potent blend of secular and religious traditions, has long been a tangle of contradictions and a repository for some of our deepest cultural concerns.

That's been the case ever since the revival of Christmas in Victorian Britain in the mid-1800s. Before that, Christmas was more of a holy day than a holiday, a day when businesses remained open and celebrations centered around churches. Britain and the US, along with other countries, imported Germanic traditions that have become mainstays of the holiday: Santa Claus and reindeer, decorated trees, Christmas carols and Advent calendars.

But the new Christmas had to balance a number of tensions: between the religious and the secular, between community and commerce, between meritocracy and capitalism (presents are supposed to be doled out on a naughty-nice continuum, but wealth is a far more useful metric than who's been good that year).

A holiday centered on gift-giving and indulgences arrived in an industrializing Britain at a time when deprivation and want were everywhere. No story captures that contrast more than "A Christmas Carol." Charles Dickens wrote the tale in 1843, and it would play a pivotal role in popularizing Christmas celebrations. But it did so through a tale of painful inequality, informed in part by Dickens's angst over children put to work in the country's mines and factories. There was wealthy miser Ebenezer Scrooge, impoverished clerk Bob Cratchit and his son Tiny Tim, desperately in need of health care his family cannot afford.

Spirits intercede not with a tale of Christianity but humanity, filtered through capitalism. Scrooge has the means to do good, and the good he does brings him joy as well: a tidy fable of philanthropy.