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 Well, another Christmas Day has come and gone, but for some of us at least, thoughts of Scrooge still linger. Perhaps it is only appropriate that a man haunted by so many ghosts one Christmas Eve should linger in spirit when Christmas Day is gone.
Ebenezer Scrooge is a character in fiction, of course, but many of us have encountered some real-life likenesses, perhaps in our homes, on our streets, in our place of business, perhaps even in our bathroom mirrors. I freely confess there is a part of my nature that finds the irascible Scrooge appealing.
One November day several years ago, I was at work when a woman in a nearby cubicle, getting a head start on the yuletide season, was playing Christmas music on a cassette player at her desk. It was not loud enough to be a disturbance, but I could clearly hear it at my desk and I decided to take note of it in a somewhat dramatic fashion.
“If I could work my will,” I growled in my best imitation of old Ebenezer, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
“Jack!” shrieked the startled young woman who had been working quietly and listening peacefully to the carols playing. I won’t say my little 15 seconds (or less) of infamy and her shocked reaction to it made my day, but the truth is I don’t remember another single thing about that day.
There is some perverse pleasure to be had in being a curmudgeon, which is why Scrooge, the cold, angry-at-the-world, mean-spirited Scrooge at the beginning of A Christmas Carol is a character of enduring appeal. In fact, it may seem strange that that Scrooge seems to have a greater hold on the reader’s imagination than the kind, generous benevolent Scrooge we are left with when Dickens is done with him. The satirist Mark Russell has even told of a man who liked to watch a movie version of A Christmas Carol backwards, “so he’ll like the way it ends.”
Well, if you stay with the story all the way through and you’re not just in it for the “Bah! Humbug,” you can get to like both Scrooge the curmudgeon and Scrooge the humanitarian. But I guess there was a time when I started envying Scrooge the capitalist. Dickens didn’t tell us how rich Scrooge was, but he was “rich enough” to be merry at Christmas, his nephew Fred reminded him. And when I say I envied him, I don’t mean that I ever wanted some self-important government agency to take his wealth from him and distribute it to starving writers. I mean I wished I could have had something Scrooge had earned (but apparently didn’t enjoy), a sense of accomplishment from being good enough at something to have made a lot of money at it. I don’t know, and may never know, what that is like.
So the words of Scrooge that haunted me most were not the words I quoted to shock my gentle officemate, but these words, which came from the same conversation between Scrooge and his nephew:
“What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?” Yes, those are haunting words, indeed.
The end of the year comes hard on the heels of Christmas and with it comes a natural, almost inevitable taking of inventory, a look back to see what you have accomplished in the past 12 months. Have you gained any ground? Have you moved any closer to your goals in your personal life or in your career? Or have you managed to avoid even setting goals for another year? Are you, indeed, just “a year older but not an hour richer…?” If so, the words of Scrooge, that unsentimental realist, can be a stinging rebuke.
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.” There are, I suspect, few among us who have never looked back and said, “If only…” I recall a time I was doing just that in a conversation with my best friend of `high school days. I was lamenting that I had not been more ambitious and more enterprising in recognizing and acting upon various opportunities that had passed my way. If I had done this, that or the other thing, I said, I might have been successful. My friend brought me up short with a simple and basic question.
“How do you define success?” he asked. I didn’t know the answer to that. And I still don’t.
But I do know that Jesus, the Son of God and son of Mary, the foster child of Joseph the carpenter, the Jesus we find in the Gospels, did not get along very well with people the world considered successful. At his birth, a king tried to kill him. Just before his death, the governor of Judaea, who could have freed him, instead publicly washed his hands of him. The Pharisees and Sadducees both feared and ridiculed him, while the common people, we are told, “heard him gladly.” Sinners rejoiced at his kindness and mercy. The important people — the successful people — condemned and conspired to kill him.
That is not to say all those who are successful in this world are enemies of Christ or otherwise evil. But we do have a warning from Jesus that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet with God, all things are possible. It is also possible, even likely, that the woman Jesus observed contributing two pitiful little coins to the temple treasury is greater in the kingdom of heaven than all the Rockefellers, Carnegies and J.P. Morgans who ever lived. It may be that the woman who wept at the feet of Jesus, or the one who merely sat at his feet and listened, is greater in the eyes of God than the Queen of England or the legendary queen of the Nile. The boy who contributed five barley loaves and two fishes to the feeding of the five thousand may have done more good in God’s eyes than billionaire Bill Gates with all his philanthropic giving.
It may seem strange, but when thinking on such things, I recall a newscast I heard on the radio on the morning of the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina in the year 2000. A woman was explaining to an interviewer why she was going to vote for George W. Bush.
“He comes from good stock,” she said of the candidate whose father had been Vice President and President of the United States and whose grandfather had been a United States senator. Yes, future presidents usually come from “good stock.” Their parents have reservations at the finest inns. They weren’t born in stables.
It is ironic that by the end of the day on December 25th, the very day that Scrooge so wholeheartedly, once and forever, learned to “keep Christmas well,” so many of us who take the name of Christ decide that Christmas is all over and we are on to other, more pressing matters. It’s too late for “Merry Christmas” and we barely have time for “Happy New Year!” We are a restless people, always moving forward. It’s on to the new calendar, on to Martin Luther King Day, on to Super Bowl parties, on to Ground Hog Day. On to a new and, we dare to hope, more prosperous and successful year. But somewhere in the dim recesses of the faintly echoing “holiday season,” we may hear the quiet voice of a courageous friend of Jesus and a friend of the poor, one who lived upon this earth to serve the Child in the manger and all other outcasts of fortune. We may yet hear the voice and heed the words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta:
“We are called not to be successful, but to be faithful.”
Jack Kenny is a freelance writer living in New Hampshire. Send him an email at jkenny2@netzero.com.
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