Ebenezer's Ghosts Still Carry the Spirit of Christmas

This column first ran in The Spokesman-Review in 2007 under the headline Revisiting Scrooge.
This week, losing the fight with a miserable cold, I decided to surrender and rest. I turned off my phone and crawled back under the covers with my copy of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. When I finished the book I may not have lost the cold but I was warm and comfortable and filled with the spirit of Christmas.

 I pulled the book off the shelf, plumped up the pillows on my bed and settled in for a good read. The book is old, almost 100 years old, and the pages are dog-eared and as brown and fragile as dried leaves. I’ve had it since I was a girl.

Alone in the room, a blanket over my feet, I opened it and read the first line: “Marley was dead; to begin with.”

Six little words and I am deep in a familiar landscape.

Over the years I’ve picked up my old copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol many times. I don’t read it every year – I should – but I do try to read it often enough to retain the feel of the piece. There’s simply nothing else like it.

This year, like every other time, I was struck by the power of the bleak and frigid scene described. By the vivid images painted by words.

You know the story … It is Christmas Eve, but that doesn’t matter to Ebenezer Scrooge. He doesn’t keep the holiday. Scrooge is a cold man, frozen by the coldness within him. He is a bitter and lonely and miserly man who has forsaken every human comfort. He eats only what he needs to live. He has no use for celebration or financial – or emotional – extravagance. He is, Dickens tells us, as self contained and solitary as an oyster.

By the time I’d finished the first chapter I was so deeply absorbed that when I looked up I realized I had burrowed down under the comforter until it covered me completely. It was even draped over my head.

When I peeked out, still under the spell of the book, thinking of the “piercing, biting, searching cold” of London streets, I half expected to see my breath hang in the air like little clouds. But the lamps were on and the room was warm and cozy.

I covered my head and went back to my book. I was swept up in the visits by the spirits. By the quiet dignity of Bob Cratchit. By the gradual softening of Scrooge’s heart.

I was interrupted and had to put the book down and I didn’t pick it up again for a few days. When I did, I fell quickly back into the story and read it to the end.

It’s a shame about Scrooge. Oh, I don’t mean what happened to him the night the spirits came to show him the error of his ways. I mean what has happened to him in the more than 160 years since he was created by Charles Dickens.

To most people, Ebenezer Scrooge is a cantankerous character from a movie or a cartoon. He is an actor dressed in stylized Victorian garb, a caricature of greed and heartlessness. He scowls and spits Bah Humbug to anyone who approaches. He is a symbol of penny pinching and stinginess. The lack of Christmas spirit.

But the real Scrooge only comes alive when you read the book. That’s when you see the deepest message in the tale. It wasn’t just his greed and lack of charity that nearly destroyed the man. It was the isolation. The lack of human closeness and comfort. His world drew in tightly around him and he learned “To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.” He forgot how to be tender. He grew hard and flinty. He became “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.”

That is what the spirits revealed to him. When he saw the damage done to himself and others, Scrooge begged to be allowed to make amends. And his gift – his Christmas miracle – was that the night was rewound and he was allowed a fresh start.

For the rest of his life, “Scrooge was better than his word,” Dickens tells us. “He did it all and infinitely more.”

Tonight is Christmas Eve. The night when each of us, in our own way, is visited by the ghost of Christmas present and that yet to come. And when, like poor old Ebenezer Scrooge as he clung to the ghost of Christmas past, we will be “conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys and cares long, long, forgotten.”

God bless us every one.

The Weight of Words

        

        Lately, I have been editing my collection of books, thinning the shelves, lightening the load of reading material I’ve accumulated over the last decade or so.

Each day I take an empty shopping bag, the sturdy fabric kind with strong handles, down to the storeroom in my basement and I bring it back up full of books. I take the heavy bag to the “used book” counter at the bookstore downtown. They take what they want, give me store credit and I donate the rest to a favorite charity. This has been going on for a couple of weeks now. Over and over again I descend to the storeroom and return with as much as I can carry away. 

I have never been one to resist a good book. It’s not in my DNA. I pick them up at garage sales, at bookstores--new and used-- at airports and library sales. I’m swayed by an illustration, a subject, a cover, an author. I hold the book in my hands and in my mind’s eye I can actually see myself reading it, swathed in afghans, sipping tea, reclining on the chaise lounge in my room. Each book holds the promise of a few moments to myself, the chance that it will improve me, educate me, enthrall me. So I am sold. Then, the book comes home to sit beside my chair, gather dust beside my bed until it is read and, finally, rest on the shelves in my basement. Sometimes I buy a book because someone I know might like it but I either forget to give it to them or realize it wasn’t the right gift after all, and on the shelf it goes.

Every once in a while, when the weight of books becomes too much for the shelves ------and my conscience--to support, I hold myself accountable for the clutter and decide what I will keep for a bit longer and what I will let go.

Some of the books on those shelves are old friends. They are my family. Those books will stay there until I’m the one carried out of the house. Others were impossible to resist at the time, but they’ve lost their appeal.  Some were fun to read but not something I want to keep forever. Others--the travel guides and how-to books, for instance--are obsolete and others are no longer up-to-date. Into the bag they all go. Carrying one bag at a time up the stairs, I feel like I’m secretly tunneling my way out a fortress of words.

Of course, there is that store credit. And I have already brought home one or two new books from my book-selling trips. But that’s something to worry about in a few years. When the shelves fill up again.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap’s weekly column is published by Spokesman.com. Her audio essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the U.S. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” (available at Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane) and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com