I took a break from the last book I’m reading for the year (which might not make it under the 2025 wire) to re-visit A Christmas Carol.

I bought this book a few years back - maybe as many as ten years ago, I don’t remember exactly. I read it aloud to everyone at dinner - at least once. Maybe for a couple of years around Christmas I did that.

And I hadn’t picked it up in a long while, so I thought it would be perfect for this year.

It’s so good.

Ebenezer Scrooge! What a name. What a character.

The only trouble with reading this book is I have a hard time imagining what is happening in my brain without thinking about Mickey’s Christmas Carol, where all of the Disney characters were the Dickens characters…or, if I don’t picture Mickey and the gang, it’s the Muppet version.

The story is so well-written. It’s almost immediately clear why it became a classic so quickly.

And I spent a lot of time reading the book pausing for a second to think about what it might have been like to read it when it was brand new and there weren’t a hundred versions of it - either parody or visualized in movie or on stage or cartoon form.

Imagine when that story was brand new!? A miserable old man is visited by four ghosts and it makes him change his ways? What a story.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the story was an immediate hit.

I also looked something else up - there are certain parts of the book I didn’t fully understand. I got them because of context, but there are parts that use very old language and I just kind of skim it rather than understand it.

One part that’s pretty clear, though, is that Marley tells Scrooge that the next three ghosts are going to visit over three nights. Obviously, as we all know from the many re-makes of the story (and I’ll pause here to say it is remarkable how true to the book those re-makes are), the visits take place on one night.

I assumed that, since the book was originally published as separate chapters in periodicals over time, maybe Dickens published the first chapter and then by the time he got to the second and third ghosts decided one night was better for all of it.

But someone online suggests that since Scrooge spends so much time with each ghost, what was one night in his life was actually a few nights in ghost time. (And explains why he’s so relieved that when he wakes up it’s still only Christmas Day.)

I don't know. All I know is I loved re-reading the book.

The last chapter, after Scrooge changes his ways, is very sweet. Visiting his nephew, goofing around with Bob Crachit…

He really turned it around, the old son of a gun.