Bah! Humbug!

A couple of days ago I did something I've never done before: I started reading Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol." Naturally, I've seen several movie versions and countless television parodies. But I've never read the original previously. It's quite a different experience than seeing it performed on stage or screen. I'm not finished with it yet, but I can clearly see that Ebenezer Scrooge has the grumpy thing mastered far better than I do. (Maybe for this one day I should change my moniker to "Poker Scrooge.")

If you find yourself with nothing more important to do on Christmas, I recommend reading it. You can find it here, including scans of the illustrations from the first edition (1843), from which the above two images were stolen: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/46

The second picture pertains to this paragraph, which occurs just before Marley's Ghost departs:

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few ... were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

So after you've spent a couple of hours delighting yourself with Dickens, if you still find yourself with some available time on December 25, consider finding somebody who is a little less well off than you are, and figuring out a way to help him or her, while the power to do so is still in you.

Come to think of it, maybe that's not bad advice for the other 364 days of the year, too.

Merry Christmas.