All I Want for Christmas Is to Be Like Ebenezer Scrooge ... And So Should You!

Lessons from 'A Christmas Carol,' for every day of the year

Actor Tommy Steele in his role as Ebenezer Scrooge at the London Palladium in London, on Oct. 27, 2005. We might all aspire to become more Scroogelike, not the misanthrope, but the reborn Ebenezer, who came to value laughter, generosity, and affection. MJ Kim/Getty Images

Other than the accounts of a birth in a manger, the most popular and best-known Christmas story in the English-speaking world is Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” First published on Dec. 19, 1843, this novella about a miser, visitations from three Christmas spirits, and a conversion of the heart was sold out by Christmas Day of that same year.

Since then, generations have read this beloved tale. The miser’s name, Scrooge, became a part of the English language, used to designate a grouchy money-grubber who despises the holiday season. In addition, more than 100 movies, television episodes, plays, ballets, musicals, and operas have recreated “A Christmas Carol.” To find someone over the age of 12 who’s never heard of the celebrated Scrooge would likely be a more demanding task than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Consequently, there’s no need here to recount even a barebones summary of “A Christmas Carol.” We know the man, and we know his story—at least the gist of it. When I used to annually teach this novella to seminars of homeschoolers, every year, several students would ask me why we were reading a story everyone already knew. “For Dickens’s words,” I’d tell them, “which aren’t the same as watching it on television or in a theater.”

For reasons that don’t bear repeating, I recently revisited that book and the final part of “A Christmas Carol,” what Dickens called “Stave Five: The End of It.” In that chapter is distilled the wisdom imparted to Scrooge by his Christmas ghosts, insights intended for the rest of us as well.

Awakenings

When morning comes and Scrooge finds himself safe in his own bed after his three Christmas ghosts have departed, his first words are, “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!”

Here’s the first gem of wisdom cut for us by Scrooge, particularly applicable to the upcoming New Year. We aren’t meant to dwell only in memories of the past or in dreams of the future. No—we must recognize that we simultaneously inhabit all three of these time zones, past, present, and future, and that this blend of personal history, current circumstances, and visions for tomorrow is the essence of our humanity.

Scrooge next realizes that his ghosts have offered him release from his prison of greed and loneliness. In particular, he rejoices when he understands that his pitiable entreaties to the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come “to have his fate reversed” have been answered. “I am as light as a feather,” he cries, “I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy, I am as giddy as a drunken man.” This newfound exultation is the engine that drives him as he charges off to change his ways and make amends to those he has damaged by his greed and ill will.

Here, Scrooge reveals to us the pure joy that can come from embracing goodness.

Patching Up the Past

That Christmas morning, the deliriously merry Scrooge first dispatches an enormous turkey to the home of his impoverished employee, Bob Cratchit. Later, while strolling the streets, he meets a man soliciting funds for the poor, a portly gentleman who just the day before had approached Ebenezer asking for a donation for the poor and had been sent packing. Now, Scrooge promises the man a sizable sum for his cause, telling him, “A great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you.” He proceeds eventually to his nephew’s house, joins in the Christmas party there, and repairs that broken relationship. The following morning, he arrives at his counting house early, catches Bob Cratchit arriving late for work, and rather than firing him, promises a raise and assistance to his family.

Offering genuine apologies and amends to those we have wronged or ignored, and for that matter, accepting those apologies in turn, is often missing in both the public and private spheres of today’s society. When, for instance, someone on social media expresses her regrets for a careless, hurtful remark she posted online as an adolescent, those who attacked her in the first place frequently double down on their assaults, leaving forgiveness and mercy aside. Within our own circle of family and friends, some of us also find it difficult to ask for or grant pardon for wrongdoing.

Yet making amends, as Scrooge realizes, repairs and restores relationships. Today’s 12-step programs recognize this healing grace. Steps 8 and 9 for Alcoholics Anonymous asks recovering alcoholics to make a list of all persons they have harmed, while Step 9 directs them to make those amends a reality (unless they might harm others by doing so).

Here’s a classic example of laying our wrongs on the table and asking for absolution. In the final months before his death in 1991 from a brain tumor, Republican Party consultant Lee Atwater apologized both publicly and privately to the political enemies he had wounded with his verbal attacks and accusations, including an apology to former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Whatever we may think of Atwater’s politics—he was a hard-charging adviser to George H.W. Bush—like Scrooge, he’d come to a place in his life where he understood what was truly important and acted accordingly.

Spreading the Spirit

After Scrooge dresses and goes out into the streets, he encounters passersby, just as had happened during his time with the Ghost of Christmas Present. But here was the difference: “Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured fellows said, ‘Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!’ And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.”

A little later: “He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk—that anything—could give him so much happiness.”

And near the end of “Stave Five,” we learn that “he became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

From these passages, we know that Scrooge’s happiness is contagious, that his interior delight and glee shine forth and bring light to those around him. Our culture is in need of such a pandemic of sunshine today, and though some people consistently deliver that illumination, many of us, including me, often walk past people on the streets while under a cloud.

Following in Scrooge’s Footsteps

The spirits hold a mirror to Scrooge, reflecting a despised miser and a twisted man turned inward upon himself, and so transform him into a human being who could feel love and empathy. He becomes, as Dickens tells us at the very end of his story, a man “who knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” From what Dickens tells us of this change of heart, Scrooge also knows how to keep Christmas well every day of the year.

As for us, this Christmas season we might all aspire to become more Scrooge-like, not the misanthrope who was “warning all human sympathy to keep its distance,” but the reborn Ebenezer, the inmate newly sprung from his homemade prison who came to value laughter, generosity, and affection more than all the gold that had composed the bars and bricks of his cell.