Scrooge Redeemed

​Every December, I sit down with Ebenezer Scrooge, “…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, clutching, covetous old sinner” as Charles Dickens described him. The image of the lonely, tight-fisted miser growling “Bah, humbug!” at anyone daring to draw him into the spirit of Christmas, is etched deep into the imagination of the Western World. Along with dozens of other equally vivid characters, Scrooge made Dickens the rock-star storyteller of the 19th century.
 
The 100-page story A Christmas Carol has been credited with launching the modern celebration of feasting and family that dominates the year’s end all across the globe. What’s mostly forgotten is the fact Dickens designed it as a parable of redemption and I’m sure that’s the magnetism that has tugged at me every Christmas for fifty years or more.
 
It's a ghost story with a difference. 

​One Christmas Eve, as a thick London fog closes in, Scrooge sitting alone in his dark apartment is struck with fear by dreadful clanking of chains being dragged up the stairs from the cellar deep beneath him. His long-dead partner Jacob Marley passes through the locked door to warn him that he is on the brink of damnation. During the course of the night, three Christmas spectres transport him to a series of vivid scenes and deliver stern rebukes. The first reminds him of kindnesses done him in his youthful days that he has forgotten. The second shows him how avarice slowly and surely drained him of generosity and joy and the third terrifies Scrooge with scenes of him perishing unloved and unlamented.
 
The shrivelled soul of the hoarder is profoundly shaken and at last he kneels before the Spirit vowing, ‘I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it the whole year!’  As the bells ring out the arrival of Christmas Day, Ebenezer Scrooge is a changed man – he happily hurls himself into a frenzy of generosity and kindness to make up for missed opportunities.
 
I suspect Dickens had in mind the story of the despised tax-collector Zaccheus who, after a meeting with Jesus, rushed to repay the people he had rorted. You sense Jesus must have smiled delightedly as he watched this turnabout, because he commented, ‘Salvation has come to this house today!” I feel the same as I watch Charles Dickens transform Scrooge’s sad, cynical life into a heartening Christmas carol.