Garrison Keillor does a Charles Dickens in “A Christmas Blizzard,” the latest in a long line of narratives from the funny, irreverent — and often profound — “man from Lake Wobegon.”

He gives us, in the guise of wealthy Chicagoan James Sparrow, not exactly Scrooge but “a recovering disadvantaged child” who loathes Christmas because of bad boyhood associations with cold winters in North Dakota — chief among them the fear that his tongue will freeze to a pump handle.

“Putting your tongue on a pump handle” was something Mr. Sparrow’s mother used to warn against: “Your tongue would freeze to it, and there you’d be, stuck, and somebody would have to come and either warm up the handle with a blow torch or else tear your tongue off it.”

Leave it to Keillor to create a rich man who suffers, absurdly, from “Tongue on the Pump Handle Syndrome,” a condition so shameful he has consulted a whole string of therapists about it but has never been able to bring himself to tell his Christmas-loving wife of its existence.

Not when Mrs. Sparrow, his “darling Joyce,” attends “two ‘Nutcrackers’ every year, two ‘Messiahs,’ and three ‘A Christmas Carols’ ” (and serves on all of their boards).

This year, instead, Mr. Sparrow wants to leave their “baronial twelve-room apartment on the 55th floor of the Wabasha Tower,” and spend the season at the Sparrows’ Hawaiian estate at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau — where there is no cold and therefore nothing to fear in the way of pump handles.

“Poor Mr. Dickens and the juggernaut he had wrought,” Mr. Sparrow rationalizes. “Back when he wrote about Scrooge and the nebbishy Cratchits, Christmas was a one-day event, like Valentine’s Day or Memorial Day, and you did the thing on that day and it was over, but his little book created a rage of Christmas, and it spread out of control, and now the good man would be horrified to see it.”

Keillor, of course, is acknowledging that Dickens’ “little book” also spawned a rage of “A Christmas Carols”-to-come, among them, 166 years later, Keillor’s new “A Christmas Blizzard.”

Like other Keillor novels, this one gives us the wit and merriment of his radio and stage shows, along with a darkness, a cynicism—a real taste, if you will, of another’s human condition.

It also gives us a bit of James Thurber, entertaining us — as Thurber did via the Lord High Chamberlain, Royal Wizard and Royal Mathematician in “Many Moons” — with whole paragraphs that are nothing but lists, wonderful, telling lists.

Add to this a good old-fashioned North Dakota snowstorm and “A Christmas Blizzard” becomes something more substantial than the usual Christmas tale.

For it is at this point that the phobic Mr. Sparrow finds himself back in Looseleaf (the wonderfully named fictional town of his childhood) and, although he predictably confronts his winter-weather and frozen-tongue fears, he does so in a thoroughly unconventional, Keilloresque way.

In fact, Looseleaf may as well be Twin Peaks as the ghosts, roughly of Christmas Past, Present and To Come, turn out to be a wolf who is really Mr. Sparrow’s childhood friend, Ralph, who drowned at 25; “Big-Hair Lady,” a woman who takes no guff; and Mr. Sparrow’s cousin, Liz, who is — horrors! — a rabid Republican as well as “a leader of the citizen coalition Possum Comatosis.”

Ralph/the wolf tells Mr. Sparrow, “I was a happy man with a sad life and you are a sad man with a happy life.”

Big-Hair Lady upbraids him for what he has become: “You’re all tied up in knots about money and getting old and the daily insult of the bathroom mirror. You walk down city streets with no eye for your fellow citizens, you are offered magnificent music and exit early so you won’t get caught in traffic. You think happiness is somewhere out in the future.”

Big-Hair Lady gives Mr. Sparrow 24 hours to make peace with his past, including the people of his past. Cousin Liz does her one better by placing Mr. Sparrow eye-to-eye with his “issues.”

“Listen, James,” she orders. “No jerk in an office with a bunch of certificates on the wall is going to talk you out of your own demons.”

Before it’s all over, we get to spend some time with the folk of Looseleaf, meeting along the way the unflappable Uncle Earl; the devious Uncle Leo; the Ojibway storyteller Faye — and an old Chinese man who is the first to see Mr. Sparrow making some life progress:

“So you see what you’ve done, Mr. Sparrow. More than you know.”

“What about Christmas?” asks Mr. Sparrow.

“What about it? It’s a nice day. Sing more and talk less. Try putting ginger in the cranberry. It helps.”

In short, “A Christmas Blizzard” may well be the perfect present for the misanthrope on your list— the one who, as Mr. Sparrow did, thinks he has everything.

A Christmas Blizzard

By Garrison Keillor

Viking

180 pages, $21.95