Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, and New Year’s Day—these holidays are upon us. We are frenzied. Check your mail, there might be donation requests from organizations that assist the poor. Note the brown bags in your supermarket; they hold the contents for a holiday meal for a family. Can you put a bag in your shopping cart and add its cost to your grocery total? Your church or one near your residence may be preparing to serve a Christmas meal to the homeless or working poor. Will you donate food, money, yourself to the effort? There are toy drives by firehouses, churches, organizations so that children are remembered in this gift-giving season. Would you joyfully give a gift to a child?
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol when London and other urban areas were experiencing rapid industrialization. Farmers fled the grueling work of their agricultural life with dreams of finding more money in wages and a better life in large cities. Tragically, they were confronted with industrial opportunists who paid little and slavishly worked employees. Slums metastasized in people, poverty, and crime. The bottom line—profit—was all the industrialists and related businesses saw. Ebenezer Scrooge, the main character, represents this ravenous economic greed, and blindness to anything or anyone beyond money. A ghost of the past opens the tightly closed portals of Scrooge’s childhood and young adult life. The profound sorrow of those times was edged briefly with happiness. Ebenezer Scrooge became a hoarder of money and unyielding disclaimer of good will.
Access to Facebook implies that we have food, shelter, clothing and are reasonably comfortable. Are there incidents in our past that cause us to overlook the needy? Are there elderly persons that we know who need food, toiletries, or a phone call (We still need to be wise, and practice safety because of the plague of the coronavirus)? Who do you know that is alone during these holidays?
Thanksgiving helps us to remember to have gratitude. Hanukkah reminds us that possible is the larger part of the word impossible. Let us consider this question today: Are we Ebenezer Scrooge, misers of time, money, and a word of hope amid poverty in spirit and goods?
Reflections
- Why did Charles Dickens write A Christmas Carol?
- How was Dickens able to relate to the poor population of London?
- What is a carol?
- What did the Spirit of the Past enable Scrooge to glimpse about himself?
- Below are novels by Charles Dickens:
Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield,
A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Old Curiosity Shop.
6. A Christmas Carol has never been out of print since it was first published in 1843.
- *Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. London, Chapman & Hall, 1843.
Dorothy Watson Tatem, D.Min., ACC
Senior Associate
Next Step Associates, LLC
Cassandra W. Jones, Ed.D.
CEO & President
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