a christmas classic

If you haven’t read Charles Dickens a Christmas carol yet then you are denying yourself one of the greatest Christmas story ever.

The story:
Ebinezer Scrooge is a greedy, selfish miser who hates Christmas with a passion. So much that he drives his nephew (the only person who you can say actually loves him), and tortures his clerk Bob Cratchet. He is so mean he tells the charity workers who are out to collect money for the poor that he hopes they all die to “decrease the world’s population.”

When he comes home he confronts the ghost of his dead business partner Jacob Marley. Jacob tells him the hell he has to endure for being a greedy miser, and tells him that his fate his worse. However Marley is giving him a chance to escape his fate and that is thorough three ghosts. The ghosts are that of Christmas past, Christmas present and future past. If he does not learn anything from these 3 ghosts he will be doomed in his afterlife.

Dickinson does an excellent job on the main character of Scoorge. He starts off has a flat character, which you just love to hate. He stinchy, greedy, and just plain mean, and you wouldn’t mind if a train hit him before the end of the book. Has the story proceeds and you meet each of these ghosts you will see his hard child life, the lost of his sister, and getting dumb by a girl he had loved because of his love of profit. You find out that he hasn’t always been a miser but because of such a hard live has left him bitter.

With each ghost Scrooge learns new things about himself, the people around him, and the true nature of Christmas. He starts to slowly gradually changes in till the ghost of Christmas future shows him what his death will be like if he doesn’t change.

Dickens sets the pace of the story remarkably well so the changes seem to be gradual, but not slow in coming. Because Dickens tells the story so well when we finally see the man Scrooge becomes at the end of the book we are not surprised or disappointed.

The Christmas carol is a book that I guarantee anybody who likes Christmas story will love.