Life: it will hurt you sooner or later. You can respond one way or the other: with faith in compassion and love or with the fear that makes love so difficult. A Christmas Carol’s Ebenezer Scrooge wasn’t born a scrooge. In his childhood and youth he’d been full of goodwill. But life, with its cares and demands, had battered him about, had disappointed him enough that he gave himself over to the acquisition of money and the little power it afforded him over his fear of death. And then one Christmas Eve, his former and “beastly dead” partner, Jacob Marley, appeared to warn him of what awaited him in the afterlife if he did not change his ways. Scrooge was frightened, but not convinced. Enter Christmas Past, Present and Future. In an admixture of fear and love, Scrooge underwent the conversion made manifest on Christmas Day in generosity, kindness and amends.

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is perhaps the most popular Christmas story ever written this side of Bethlehem. Published in 1843, it revived a joyful and celebratory attitude toward Christmas and the Christmas season in England and America that had been lost with the 19th century’s industrialization and urbanization. With the efforts of Victoria’s kind husband, Prince Albert, who introduced the German customs of the Christmas tree and Christmas cards, and with the publication and immense popularity of Dickens’s novella, the Christmas season again became for England and America what it was meant to be – a season of joy, hope, celebration, gratitude and love. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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