Dear Friend,

A very Merry Christmas to you. I hope your holiday season has been festive and relaxing, and that your experience reading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was as pleasant and engaging as mine!

This week, we finished the book by reading Staves Four and Five, and once again, Dickens employs the “bell device,” as I’m calling it, to ring in each of these chapters. In Stave Five, though, and for the first time this entire story, the bells are “merry” for Christmas morning. Old Scrooge has come through the night—it was indeed a single night, not three!—and awakes a new man.

In some of our conversations online throughout the week, I was surprised to learn that many readers doubt that Scrooge was really a changed person. There was a lot of discussion about how he might have gone back to being the same awful miser as he had been just as soon as the holidays were finished or whenever he felt he was “off the hook,” but I don’t feel the same. To me, Scrooge appeared genuinely unsettled by each ghost’s visit, and no more so than by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

This spirit is the first to frighten Scrooge and it also shows Scrooge more examples, takes him on more visits, than any of the others. Scrooge is also slowest on the uptake in this one. He seems to understand what’s happening, even what’s expected of him, during his visits through Christmas Past and Present, and the emotions that are stoked, of regret, nostalgia, appreciation, and embarrassment, among others, are genuine and recognizable. But in Stave Four, it takes him a very long time to understand that all these examples are about himself.

When he does begin to realize this, he first asks the spirit to show him anyone who feels emotion at the mystery man’s death. In response, he’s shown a young debtor couple who are overjoyed at his passing and the burden lifted by it. Realizing his mistake, he then asks the spirit specifically to show him anyone who feels “tenderness” connected to the man’s death. He’s foiled again, though, by being shown the Cratchits, who are grieving indeed, but they grieve the loss of their son Tim, whose fate Scrooge realizes is intimately connected with his own.

So, this becomes the real question: Is it his own fate he fears, his death and his miserable afterlife, or is it knowing that Tiny Tim will die, too, if Scrooge can’t change, that affects him so? Maybe it’s both, but to me, the signal change comes because of Tim. After all, Scrooge bears witness to multiple examples of people reacting to his own death with indifference and joy without his revelation to “honor Christmas in [his] heart.” It’s only witnessing Tim’s death, followed immediately by the vision of his own gravestone, that he understands there are two lives at stake, and it is in his power alone to save them both.

But does the change last? The story says it’s so, and I’ve seen no reason not to trust the narrator, whomever it is. In Stave Five, Scrooge awakes giddy with laughter and “quite a baby,” born anew. His first thoughts are of care for the Cratchits and his nephew, and he recognizes for the very first time the “won-der-ful happiness” all around him. Most importantly, though, the narrator tells us that “Scrooge was better than his word.” He promised the final spirit that he’d keep Christmas in his heart all year, and the story shares that this remained true “ever afterward,” so that “it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well.”

The story concludes with a final pairing of Scrooge and Tiny Tim. While Scrooge’s “own heart laughed,” Tiny Tim’s blessing is reiterated: “God bless us, Every One!” And so, the two were always connected, and will always be, just as youth and experience must be balanced in any life of joy and wisdom.

On January 1st, we will begin reading our next selection, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I’ll be back that day with some introductory information and my own reading schedule, should anyone want to join. Until then, I wish you tidings of good cheer and a happy new year. Remember to find our conversations on social media with #theCRPBlog!

Meditation: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” -Charles Dickens

With love,

~Adam

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