It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.

This line comes from Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, in the closing stave after Scrooge’s transformation. As Scrooge begins to live out his newfound generosity, Dickens widens the focus from one man’s redemption to the season’s social meaning: Christmas as a time when ordinary hierarchies soften and people are invited into warmth, play, and fellow-feeling. The remark links that spirit to the Nativity—“its mighty Founder” meaning Christ—emphasizing that the Christian origin story centers on a vulnerable child. In Victorian Britain, Dickens helped popularize a family-centered, charitable Christmas, and this sentence encapsulates that moral and emotional program.

Dickens suggests that “being children” is not mere immaturity but a moral posture: openness, wonder, and a readiness to forgive and rejoice. Christmas is “never better” for such childlikeness because the holiday commemorates a divine figure entering the world as an infant, making humility and tenderness central rather than peripheral. The quote also gently critiques adult hardness—cynicism, calculation, social coldness—by proposing that the season authorizes a return to simpler affections. In the context of A Christmas Carol, it reinforces the idea that Scrooge’s renewal involves recovering capacities he has suppressed: play, empathy, and uncomplicated kindness toward others.