Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present

Has a novel ever had a more profound influence on the world than Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"? In a sense, it is the true Ghost of Christmas Present which haunts us each and every year to become better people.

Oh sure, there are other significant novels which have helped to shape the world. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" helped to start a great war, and "On the Road" launched a movement, but those books have long since lost their immediacy and impact. Most novels do, or else as in the case of a book such as "1984," they remain instructive or prophetic without actually doing much to change people's lives.

Yet "Christmas Carol" remains as vibrant and relevant as the day it was published in 1843, and I suspect it has done more good to bring good to the world than all the homilies and sermons spoken on Sunday mornings by earnest pastors and priests in all the years of Christendom.

Perhaps, that's because it persuades us to look at our own lives - our own stinginess, thoughtlessness or selfishness - without demanding that we do so. It does so by creating the pungently repugnant figure of Ebeneezer Scrooge - 'secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster" … "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!"

No one would want to identify with such a character, and yet we all do, partly through the power of Dickens' ingenious story of four ghosts (including Marley) who come to haunt an old man on Christmas morning, and partly through the enchantment of his brawny, muscular language, which leaves us as punch drunk as spiced rum.

Year after year, we return to the bad news that "Marley was dead: to begin with." and end with the good news about the newly awakened Scrooge: "that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge."

The book travels a path from penury to perdition to repentence, and from death to life, with stops at bedlam and poverty. But the whole thing is done with such understanding and kindness that even the worst of it must be savored, and it is done too without a word of Christian dogma, yet captures full well the spirit of the gentle Galilean whose birth is celebrated at this time every year.

It is also worth noting as we pass these last few days before Christmas that the reasons we remember Scrooge is not because of his capacity for evil, but rather his capacity for change. Although his name is synonymous with miserliness, he would be little remembered or necessary were he just another poster boy for sin. We have enough of those.

Intead, let's remember that old Ebeneezer is for us the same as Marley's Ghost was for him - an emissary meant to show us the way to a better life. It is the good Scrooge, the repentent one, who should rightly haunt us until we learn the lesson of love. "God bless us, every one!"

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com