A toast to Mr. Scrooge

For the past seven years my daughter has played a part in a local production of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, the 1843 short story which to a striking degree laid the foundation for how Christmas is celebrated today. This particular production amplifies the comedic undertones of the original and is very contemporary, which is one of the reasons it just celebrated its 48th birthday. I saw it for the first time when I was in elementary school. For reference, my older child just returned from his first semester in college. The only constant in the play, which is interpreted as a musical, is Ebenezer Scrooge, played by the creator of the series.

Scrooge, of course, is a petty miser, a misanthrope whose hard-heartedness and self-centeredness have a terrible impact not only on himself but also on his community, starting with his longtime employee Bob Cratchit and extension, Mr. Cratchit’s family, which includes disabled child Tiny Tim.

When I first saw the play, I was maybe a little older than Tiny Tim. I remember fearful of Scrooge but also laughing at his obvious flaws. As a dreaming kid, I really didn’t need to be told not to waste my life working in pursuit of money and wealth (how ridiculous!). I didn’t need any encouragement to celebrate the holidays, especially when I stood up to receive an abundance of toys and candy in exchange for vague promises of decent behavior. But I was shocked at the sight of Tiny Tim’s death. It really left an impression. Children weren’t supposed to die.

Well, they weren’t supposed to die in Raleigh in the 1970s, but in London in the 1840s, well, there was no such implied warranty. As Britain’s agrarian economy gave way to the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian era, urban children living in horrific conditions became more and more common. Dickens himself was forced to work as a child after his father was jailed for debt. Corn A Christmas Carol is not just a harangue against child labor; instead, it poses bigger questions for Victorian England, and really, of course, all of us: What kind of society are we? Who are we as a people? Are we, as my economics professors have described to us using an x ​​and y axis, nothing more than labor and capital?

After all, when I returned to A Christmas Carol as an adult I have to admit that old Mr. Scrooge seemed much more sympathetic, maybe even prophetic. Why, who among us really enjoys the mad rush until Christmas Day? The overspending, excess, cheeky marketing and rampant cynicism all seem to suggest that Scrooge might have been on to something. Bah, the farce, indeed! Even the tendrils of Scrooge’s most despicable notion that society should seek to “reduce the world’s surplus population” seeks to take dark root.

However, the horror of Tiny Tim’s plight had not abated. As a younger adult, with my own small children, watching this scene struck me more than before. Every child is afraid of death, but parents fear nothing more than the death of their children. I can hardly bring myself to write about it. So for me the meaning of A Christmas Carol started to change, like all of our lives, from the story of my own dreams to the story of my dreams for someone else.

Scrooge’s path to redemption begins with the ghost of past Christmas reminding him of the younger version of himself, the one who loved and was loved, before he was hardened by time and slowly let himself be consumed by it. ambition and greed.

The Phantom evokes a vision of Scrooge’s mentor, the merry Mr. Fezziwig, a successful merchant who could be the first example in English literature of someone who had achieved the optimum “work / life balance”. Victorian readers would have recognized Fezziwig as a character from a dying era, in which wealthy landowners would open their homes to their sharecroppers for a long Christmas party (sometimes even lasting twelve days).

After all, it turns out that Scrooge was not born a monster. We learn that he was sent to boarding school at a young age by a distant father and was not allowed to return home during the holidays. Little by little, he deviated from the model of the happy and generous Fezziwig towards something miserable, but it was not until the ghost of the Christmas present showed Scrooge the intended fate of Tiny Tim that the extent of his error began. to take shape. By the time the Ghost of Christmas Future delivers Scrooge’s vision of the lonely and miserable death, we already know someone is about to change their mind.

This year my kids are much older than Tiny Tim was in that terrible sight. I even managed to get through this terrible scene without a tear, which for me is an extraordinary achievement. But I couldn’t make it through the whole room. The one that finally got me (spoiler alert) was after Scrooge converted on Christmas morning when he became Tiny Tim’s “second father”, promising to cure Tim’s lameness. They were tears of joy and hope, mixed with a few of salty resolution, for it was the recognition that we will all die eventually, that we each have to contemplate our own legacy and that we can only hope. that our worldly works will leave a positive memory. Brand.

Yes, somewhere between elementary school and AARP eligibility, the Scrooge miracle happened to me just like it happened to him. Call it humility, self-awareness, the golden rule or a commandment, the sense of Christmas has managed to enter my brain, if only for a few days. Really what matters more than the ducats we accumulate is what we do with them, how we spend our time and how we treat each other.

As Scrooge’s nephew said: “I always thought Christmas time was a good time; a kind, indulgent, charitable, pleasant time; when men and women seem, by consent, to freely open their locked hearts, and think of the people below them as if they really were fellow travelers to the grave, and not another race of creatures related to d other trips.

So just like Bob Cratchit proposed, before Scrooge was even redeemed, here is Mr. Scrooge, our party founder. For he is us, and we are him, and we will always be in each other’s company until we leave this earth.

And of course, as Tiny Tim said:

God bless us all!

Burke Koonce is an investment strategist at Trust Company of the South in Raleigh, North Carolina.