I know that Christmas was a week ago, but it is still the Christmas season, so I shall post some thoughts I had after listening to a lovely dramatization of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
A Christmas Carol is a perfectly charming story. It has been beloved by generations of readers, from when Dickens actually wrote it to the present. There are few, I think, who do not know the names of Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, and of course, the story's main character: Ebenezer Scrooge.
It is Ebenezer Scrooge that my thoughts centered around after listening to A Christmas Carol. If one looks up the word "scrooge" in a dictionary (I used the Oxford Dictionary of English), one will find a definition similar to this: "a person who is mean with money". Ebenezer Scrooge has gone down in history as a curmudgeonly old miser, who cares for nothing but money, and calls Christmas a humbug. But is this really the right way to think of Scrooge? Yes, this is his character in the beginning of the story, but A Christmas Carol is a tale of redemption and repentance. At the end of the book, Scrooge is a changed man; he has been shown the consequences of his actions, and has repented. He raises Bob Cratchit's salary, thus saving the life of Tiny Tim, to whom he furthermore becomes "a second father". He stops neglecting his nephew, Fred, he raises the salaries of all who work for him, he becomes a benevolent, kind, old grandfather figure.
I wonder why the Scrooge of the end of A Christmas Carol is seemingly forgotten. The changed Scrooge is a much nicer character than the unchanged. Perhaps, though, it is because change is hard. As fallen men, we find it much easier to judge someone and say that we will not be like them, rather than to accept a story of repentance, and repent of our own sins. That, I think, is the real lesson to be learned from A Christmas Carol. In this new year, let us try to change ourselves, repenting as Ebenezer Scrooge did.
Merry Christmas, and "God bless us, every one!"
