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But in 1953, as a freshman at the College of Wooster in Ohio, I learned that the great social and cultural event of the holiday season was a one-man performance of A Christmas Carol by a retired speech professor, who’d been at it almost 50 years at the time. I don’t remember being made aware of him when I was a child, and in school we read A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. Unable to muster the words, “Merry Christmas!” he had left the office growling, “Be here all the earlier next day, y’hear?” He lives in some form in each of us, the embodiment of the lesser self most of us hope to overcome.Ĭharles Dickens, for all his occasional mawkishness, hit the nail on the head with this story of the miser Scrooge on Christmas Eve: haunted, perhaps, by the memories of the joy-filled people he’s snarled at and dismissed earlier that day - wandering carolers his nephew Fred, with an invitation to Christmas dinner and a party afterward the “portly gentlemen” soliciting funds to feed the poor and destitute and finally his clerk, whom he had grudgingly granted a day off for the holiday. Most of all, he’s become an archetype of our darker side.
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He’s been played variously by Alastair Sim, Lionel Barrymore, and George C. His name is Ebenezer Scrooge, a name so familiar to English-speaking Westerners that it’s become a common noun. Initially well-intentioned welcomes have become tainted by infusions of what appears to be exasperation, and been distilled into flame by xenophobic rhetoric from leaders evoking people’s baser instincts.Īs the Christmas season approaches this year, a person who’s dogged me for 65 years now emerges from the bushes at the back of my brain and demands my immediate attention. Their movements, their needs, and their pleas have become a bit of a moral quandary for the citizens of the destinations to which they aspire. Over much of the world this year, desperate people have decided that their living conditions - poverty, hunger, violence, corruption - are insupportable, that almost anyplace else has got to be better than where they are, and have begun migrating toward what they hope will be better lives.