Dickens Fest is this weekend in the village

The festival details — the Victorian Marketplace; the cookie and candy cane making; Queen Victoria’s Tea; the Wishing Tree; the Festival of Trees and Light and the Children’s Lantern Parade; and much more — are all on the event website, dickensfestivalstowe.org.

Nancy Jeffries-Dwyer, primary organizer of the festival and producer of the play, said there’s a very good reason she named the event after the famous Victorian Age author.

“I believe Charles Dickens influenced, in a good way, the spirit of Christmas,” Jeffries-Dwyer said.

She shared a couple of pieces written by Victorian Age scholars who assert that, by the early 1800s, Christmas had basically gone out of fashion.

Enter the Victorians. “Christmas trees, cards, dinners, presents and carols are all either products of, or were revived during, the Victorian period,” Tom Pold wrote in The Victorian Web. “The Dickensian Christmas, with its cozy homes, hearty dinners and festive pleasures” came to embody the Victorian-era notion of Christmas, which in turn came to embody Christmas as we know it today.

Or, as Jeffries-Dwyer put it: “The gift giving is of yourself.”

That gift of giving literally has made the festival possible, she said.

When she went to the Stowe Electric Department to see if it was possible to get all the trees on Main Street strung with lights, and when she explained her lighting budget was zero, they said, no problem.

When she approached PowerShift to see if she could get a nice-looking website for zero dollars, they said, we’ve got you covered.

The holiday season reminds us that, even as social media tend to make many people more isolated as it purports to bring us closer, such 21st-century trappings truly are a new thing, and a little real human interaction is all it takes to wash away any bah-humbug.

“There’s just something about putting away your tablet and going to see a live reindeer on Main Street,” Jeffries-Dwyer said.

The event is sponsored largely by Stowe Village Vibrancy, and most of the festivities will be on or near Main Street.

Jeffries-Dwyer has asked each village restaurant to put at least one Victorian-age delectable on its menus. And there will be food trucks in town during the weekend.

Ferro Jewelers, as a presenting sponsor, will have a display of 19th-century vintage pieces, trinkets and baubles that the well-dressed of the Victorian Age might have displayed.

In “A Christmas Carol: The Musical,” Marc Yakubosky will play the famous (spoiler alert!) curmudgeon-turned-softy Ebenezer Scrooge. And a couple of local kids will be playing key roles. Tiny Tim will be played by Evan Reichelt, and his friend Grace will be played by Emiline Ouellette. Young Evan has apparently caught the acting bug, and wants to try out for “Mary Poppins” next.

Another Dickens historian, David Perdue, wrote on his website (charlesdickenspage.com), “Dickens’ name had become so synonymous with Christmas that on hearing of his death in 1870 a little costermonger’s girl in London asked, ‘Mr. Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?’”

Don’t worry, little costermonger; here on Main Street, and on the theater stage, Dickens will be alive and well.