Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol

There is a lot to say about the christmas traditions and their history and I could spend this Christmas Eve post on talking about how the Scandinavian languages have word for Christmas that derive from one of Odin's many names Jólnir. How the earliest known celebration of the birth of Jesus in the Coptic church in Egypt in the 3rd century AD was in the beginning of May and how the celebration was moved to it's current place in December due to Pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, when Christianity gained power in the Roman Empire.

I could also talk about weird Swedish traditions like eating the pagan pig Särimner every christmas. Or that we are all watching the Disney christmas special originally called From all of us, but which we call Kalle Anka (Donald Duck) at three o'clock every Christmas Eve. Or what a total uproar it becomes if Disney or SVT tries changing even one second of that show...

But I am not going to do so. This because I find it better and more important nowadays to talk about Charles Dickens's classical book A Christmas Carol. The book was published in 1843 but its message is still important to reflect upon.

A Christmas Carol tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a greedy and selfish buisness man.

Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips bue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry ching. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days, and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.

Scrooge's selfishness is clear in the description of him in the first stave (as the chapters are called in the book. An influence from the music world like the title of the novella itself also is.). He does not care for anyone or anything and is too trapped in himself that not even the weather can affect him. His cold inner nature is also clearly demonstrated by his outer one. He is mean and uncaring to everyone.

One Christmas night, he is visited by the ghost of his 7-years-dead buisness partner Jacob Marley. Marley tells him that he will be visited by three ghosts that will try to make him change his ways so he will not be doomed to haunt around the world regretting his choice not to care about others after death like himself.

'Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask', said Scrooge looking intently at the Spirit's robe, 'but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?'
'It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it', was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. 'Look here!'
From the foldings of its robe it brought two children, wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
'O man! look here! Look, look down here!' exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish, but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched thm with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared outo menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half as horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
'Spirit! are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.
'They are Man's' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. (---)' 

The three ghosts turns out to be: The ghost of Christmas past, The ghost of Christmas present and The ghost of Christmas yet to come. They have a different lesson to teach Scrooge about the importance of self-reflection, of empathy and compassion and of long-term thinking. In a world where people strives to live in the present, not reflecting on memories of the past nor of what consequences their action will have on the future, A Christmas Carol is just as an important lesson today, when the boy and girl accompanying The ghost of Christmas present grows ever stronger and when the sake of goodness, empathy and compassion are seen as something naive and bad. But there is hope. Like Scrooge, one always deserves a second chance to correct ones way of living.


God Jul! Merry Christmas!