May God Bless Us..........

Christmas Eve is also the setting for the beginning of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, a story credited with reviving Christmas in England, which begins:

"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

Scrooge is the famous bitter old miser who holds Christmas in contempt but on Christmas Eve he gives Bob Cratchit Christmas day off. He dines alone in his usual tavern, and returns to his lodgings, where on the door knocker her encounters an image of the face of Marley, his old business partner. Marley warns him that he will be visited by three spirits and if he does as they tell him, then he can escape Marley's fate, which is to walk the earth bound in chains because he had no concern for mankind during his life. The ghosts come and Scrooge awakens "'I don't know what to do' he cried, 'laughing in the same breath...I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody!'" The boy stops under the window and he sends him down to the poulterer's shop to buy the enormous turkey to send to Bob Cratchit's family. Scrooge dressed himself all in his best and got out into the streets. The people were pouring forth and walking with his hands behind him Scrooge regarded everyone with a delighted smile. He looked so pleasant that three or four good humored fellows said, "Good morning, sir. A merry Christmas to you.' And Scrooge said afterwards that they were the most delightful sounds he had ever heard in all his years. He went to church and walked up and down and found that everything could yield him pleasure.

Much as I love “A Christmas Carol,” I don’t believe Charles Dickens really did justice to the nature of his hero, Ebenezer Scrooge. If Dickens hadn’t been such a sucker for personal redemption, he might have let us see how perceptive the old Scrooge really was — the one who savors all the ironies of Christmas. How else, after a night of ghostly trauma, could he have remembered there were two prize turkeys in the poulterer’s window at the corner in the next street but one?
I always imagine Scrooge into existence for a little while about now, not because I dislike Christmas — I don’t — but because the old Scrooge is as much a part of it as the new one. “Where do you keep your young the rest of the year?” I can hear him saying while he waits for the No. 1 train at Times Square. And, indeed, the platform is filled with children who seem to be knotted together, mitten to mitten. “Have you never heard of shopping online?” he shouts on the street after being banged in the knee yet again by a heavy shopping bag. “Why don’t you go home and let some air out?” he mutters in a crowded supermarket aisle, where it looks as if everyone, swaddled in winter gear, is inflated to maximum pressure.
The really surprising thing about this time of year is that there is so little Scrooge-like behavior, so little personal holiday vitriol on the loose. Never mind that the subways are packed and the sidewalks are jammed and people who should never be allowed to drive in Manhattan have driven in nonetheless. Without all of it, the city would look only half-decorated. The story calls for a crowd scene, and we are all extras in it.
It doesn’t mean the old Scrooge doesn’t still get around. He ran a counting house, and he had his accustomed spot among the merchants at the Royal Exchange. He would have applauded the way we have turned Christmas into an economic benchmark. He would have been disappointed, I think, that we have not found a way to trade Christmas futures. He would have noted the brisk business in inflatable plastic lawn decorations. He would have ... but perhaps that’s enough of the old Scrooge for one year. Time to remember that tonight is the night when that new old man was made.