From 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens

Lingered for a while reading Stave One - Marley’s Ghost, of A Christmas Carol.

Noted some very nice lines well intended for the season and for everybody. They were exchanges between Ebenezer Scrooge and his nephew.

“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge's nephew. “You don't mean that, I am sure?”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.”

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What, right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough.”

Then here’s Scrooge expletive. Can you identify some people like him?

"Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and 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? If I could work my will every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

His nephew’s joyful thought about Christmas couldn’t be swayed though. Ponder this.

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Here are some reflections from Jacob Marley’s ghost when he showed up one night.

“It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

“…Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast mean, of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunities misused! Yet such was I!”

Truly English is a language not very easy to grasp. Very knotty and indirect and flowery but English novels always fascinate me with its plots. The morals play a very important part in an English novel, and they are very applicable.

A Christmas Carol interprets Christmas as a season with that spirit of warmth from the One who gave us salvation and from the One who gave Him to us. It enables us to be kind, forgiving and loving, too. It enables us to feel the woes of the spirits around us and in turn makes better our attitudes towards other spirits.

NEXUS: Ang Pangangaroling