I don’t know why or when I started my sort-of-tradition, but Ebenezer Scrooge and his ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future pretty regularly show up on my December reading lists. I’m a big fan of Jim Dale (thanks to his marvelous narration of the Harry Potter series) and I usually listen to Jim Dale read A Christmas Carol (which I highly recommend), but this year I noticed that Audible had a copy of Hugh Grant reading it and so I opted for that this time. It was fun to listen to a different, excellent voice, and I think the new-to-me sound brought a fresh enjoyment to the familiar story of Bah! Humbug! Scrooge changing into “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew….“
I just finished George Saunder’s wonderful book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (I recommend the audible version!) and in it, Saunders offers an aside on Scrooge, in the context of character transformation: “…Scrooge is led by the ghosts, back in time, through his life. He is shown himself as a lonely little boy left behind on the Christmas holiday; a young man in life; the recipient of his employer’s kindness. The ghosts don’t change Scrooge into someone else; they remind him that he used to be someone else. He was once someone who felt other than the way he feels now, and those earlier people still exist in him. The ghosts, we might say, switch those former people back on.”
Always interested in throughlines, this thought works for me. And causes me to think about aspects of resilience – the types of things I encounter and must adjust to, the (internal and external) resources I have access to as I do this work, and the lens(es) I use to make sense along the way……and how these things shape the character I become.
Onward! and with appreciation for the Christmas Keeping Scrooge.
Edit 1/4/2022: As one thing leads to another….my re-reading this served as inspiration for our family to watch the BBC rendition of Bleak House last week, which we enjoyed very much. Ryan has gone on to read the book now and I’ve added it to my TBR, being much slower to get these things done.
Saving Us – Katharine Hayhoe