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A Christmas Carol (The Way I See It) - or Bah, Humbug Forever 12/21/2014 12:36:12 PM
A humorous look at how the Charles Dickens classic may have been but wasn't I apologize to any reader who has trouble getting through your basic one, two, and three (to say nothing of four) word sentences, maybe you’d better take the next two days and do something besides trying to read this long winded son-of-a-bitch. This is something that I always wanted to write up, and now just seemed like the time to do it.
Back in eighteen hundred and forty-three a real Dickens of a writer published this tale out of London, England that, despite the incredible promise it shows, has disappointed me in a hundred million forms for years. While various versions of the story differ slightly in their telling, they’re all basically the same, and they certainly all end the same way. In every movie and TV show and cartoon Ebenezer Scrooge always gives in to the will of his supernatural visitors and makes the change from someone cold and wonderful who I can relate to into someone warm and pathetic who I can’t however remotely. With every recreation I viewed I always dared to hope that he might resist and remain sold on his golden path of life, but never once did he. This version has a few twists, but none of them are named Oliver.
In the opening scene old Ebenezer and his clerk, one Bob Cratchit, are in his counting-house on Christmas Eve. Bob is trying like anything to keep the remains of the one coal lump in his stove alive and with it any illusion of warmth in his office, and scrooge knows for absolute certain beyond a shadow of a shadow of a doubt that his longtime business partner Jacob Marley is quite dead, as dead as a doornail or a coffin nail as it might have been if not for the wisdom of our ancestors prior to Mr. Dickens. In one of the most enduring passages of the book a visit from Scrooge’s nephew prompts him to state that “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” And if that’s not enough, following his nephew’s departure, two gentlemen seeking donations for the poor popped in to see him and were dismissed with the response that any among the poor who would rather die than go to the prisons or the workhouses had better do it and decrease the surplus population. (How could anyone not love this character?) Some time later the greedy clerk picked his pocket for the forthcoming day’s worth of unearned wages and each was off to wander home as they saw fit.
Scrooge was greeted at his address as he fumbled with his key in the lock by the face of Marley where his knocker should have been and again in the stead of his fireplace. Before long his seven year dead business partner was loudly dragging a chain throughout the building and on the hunt. The chain was made of cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. Scrooge observed in the cheesiest line in the whole sorted affair that there was more gravy than grave about the see through figure (a natural mistake as such was the way he preferred his gravy, nice and watered down cheap). The figure assured him that he was real and went on to announce that the chain he wore was the one he had forged in life. Scrooge asked him if there was any actual money in the cashboxes and purses and if it might not be able to somehow be removed. He then said “My friend, let me rid you of your burden” and made a run at the ghost in an attempt to separate it from its chain, that if nothing else he might possibly sell said chain for scrap metal.
“That makes what I have to say next ever more enjoyable,” laughed Marley once Scrooge had passed through what used to be him and crashed into the wall and onto the floor. “Tonight you will be haunted hard by three more spirits, and these guys won’t be nearly as nice to and tolerant of you as I’ve been. Merry F-*n’ Christmas, Motherf-*r!”
“Couldn’t I take ‘em all at once like a tricked out bitch on a tinfoil screen, and be done with it?” wondered Scrooge to no avail.
He was visited in his bed at one by the ghost of Christmas past, which took him by the hand and led him to the window. He questioned the notion of him going through it and falling to the street below, and the spirit looked deeply into his eyes and gently said “Trust me,” as though it were propositioning a virgin, and out the window and to the street below went Scrooge. He bounced off the sidewalk, but was unharmed, and the spirit picked him up and flew him away to his lonely boyhood when he had been left to rot in a boarding school (where he had indeed become rotten), and to the Christmas party at the business where he had apprenticed, and to his moment of truth when he threw away the prospect of love and family with a girl named Belle for the pursuit of collecting money as opposed to hemorrhaging it, and to seven years past to check in with her and her forty or so brats. The icy wind sailed up his nightgown as he did likewise across the sky, and although he was cold entirely, some parts of his body were more so than others, with the worst of his chill settled into his loins. While watching his boyhood self he asked the spirit if he might not trade places with him, that his body temperature be increased and he have the chance to live his life over and make even more money with what he knew that he hadn’t the first time through it. At the Christmas party he asked the spirit if he might not be allowed to partake of the spiked punch so as he could steal its warmth. While Belle fled from him he found it difficult to think about loving her, as the equipment that he used for such was so blue in so many ways that it hurt immensely. When he saw her with the house full of children he knew that he had dodged a bullet.
He was visited in the room adjoining his bedroom, again at one, by the fat and jolly ghost of Christmas present, who had took it upon itself to do a little Christmas decorating and set up a feast and make itself perfectly at home while waiting for him to arrive. The spirit carried a mighty torch, which it used immediately to melt and dry out and set fire to his lower region as its laugher thundered. It then ordered him to touch its robe, and whereupon he did so he found himself in the street beneath the light of the day. The spirit took him to the simple home of his employee and showed him his family, and highlighted the most fragile among them with his little crutch and his limbs supported by an iron frame. He asked of Tiny Tim’s health and was told that as things were with the family this would be his last Christmas, and he knew that he had to do something to alter the future. The spirit then took him across town to watch his nephew and his family make merry and to listen to them trash talk him and got terribly lost en’ route and ended up half a world away. What pissed him off wasn’t talk of him being a skinflint or a dirty bastard or any such thing which invoked pride within him, but his nephew’s refusal to have anything against him, and to go so far as to feel sorry for him. He vowed to make him pay for holding him in his heart like so much Christmas merriment.
Later the tall, dark, and brooding, strong, silent ghost of Christmas yet to come snuck up upon him out of a dark alley and threw a bag over his head. It took him to the morning following his passing into damnation. He saw a slew of shopkeepers and business acquaintances and other citizens in the street, many of whom were laughing and none of whom were crying over his death. Despite all he heard and saw he couldn’t begin to ascertain who the dead man they spoke of might be or what he had to do with him and the phantom repeatedly shook its head in disbelief over his mindlessness. Next it took him back to the Cratchit household, where he saw the crutch without an owner and the broken family left behind, and he was reminded that he needed to ensure that this scene never played out, and turned and declared to his keeper with tender sincerity not to worry because he wouldn’t let it do so. He was then flown to the business district within which was his dear office, and upon seeing the building he went to it in search of himself and found someone else and a new coat of paint. The phantom came behind him as he peered into the window and put its foot to his backsides and directed him with a boney finger to what it had to show him, which was the mysterious man’s open grave. Upon reading his own name on the tombstone he had the nerve to be shocked enough to fall into the grave and onto the burlap sack holding his body. While struggling to escape he awoke in his bed with the light of the sun shinning in his window and he leaped from bed and raced to the window and flung it open. He saw a boy in the street below and wondered of him the day and whether a certain prized turkey still hung in the window of a nearby shop. He considered commissioning the boy to go and purchase the bird for him, but decided instead to give the boy another kind of bird and to take a walk and save a shilling. He then remembered his Christmas spirit training of the past night and gave the boy two birds.
He had the turkey delivered to the Cratchit household anonymously lest Bob be afraid to accept it, and paid a call upon his nephew to set him straight and give him a Christmas thrashing. He packed his bruised and bloody fists in snow on the way to the Cratchit residence to check and see if such a creature as Tiny Tim actually existed and on the turkey’s arrival. If the story of the boy wasn’t on the up and up he would take the expense the turkey had caused him out of Bob’s coal budget. He knocked upon the door and the master of the house looked badly pained to see him at it.
“Mr. Scrooge?!”
“A couple of items warrant discussion, Bob! Did you receive the fowl I had sent over?”
“Oh, I’m sorry! Did you want it back? It’s in the oven right now.”
“Settle down, big guy! It has come to my attention that you might have a cripple for a son.”
“That would be Tim, sir.”
“Fetch me the boy at once!”
He did.
“Yes, I see the little lad to be lame alright, what a shame,” proclaimed Scrooge with a crooked grin.
He bestowed upon his stunned near to death employee a title and pay upgrade which looked good on paper and assured him that he would see to it that the lad received the best medical care possible and became all the Tim that he could be. He told his clerk to get the wheels turning on getting Tim whole and healthy and to have the bills sent to him and to not worry about returning to work or not getting paid for not doing so until further notice as he had some urgent business which begged his attention outside of London. He reckoned that if Tim died it would suck the life out of Bob and cause great suffering to his work, and that after all the years he had spent molding him into such an ideal employee it would be a real shame to see that destroyed by something as tiny as the death of Tim. Besides, he thought that perhaps his generosity might instill some sense of loyalty into Bob, and knew that it didn’t really matter whether it did or not, as Bob would discover later, when it came to light that the turkey and the delivery charge for it and all of Tim’s medical bills and whatnot and his paid vacation were not unearned benefits, but yet to be earned benefits, which came with a heavy roof of interest. The payments for this loan were to be garnished from his paychecks, which were to wind up smaller than they had been prior. His only choice beyond working for his benefactor for next to nothing for the rest of his life would be going to debtor’s prison for failure to pay him the balance of the loan owed him.
The forthcoming day the mister who was a world class miser contacted those within his credit to inform them to hold off on paying him until he got back to them, and within the week he booked passage on a steamer and set off for Transylvania in search of a being of legend which he had heard tell of named Dracula, that, like Dracula, he too might become undead, and in doing so eliminate the nasty afterlife business altogether. When at last he returned to London he changed the hours of his counting-house so that daylight no longer touched them. Those who thought that he was a bloodsucker when he was technically alive were quick to learn that they hadn’t seen anything yet.
Wow, you made it all the way to the end! I’m proud of ya! Now, if you’d care to try and get through something even longer (sic.), there’s a five star e-novel (WHAT’S IN A NAME?), a psychological horror which one reviewer labeled ‘fifty shades of red in a rubber room,’ costarring a woman named Claudia who might as well be Dracula’s granddaughter, for sale on the website to which this blog is attached. It’s also available on Amazon and at various other locations across the web and on Kindles everywhere. It can be purchased for a mere 99 cents and makes a great Christmas present for someone who you dislike enough to want to give nightmares to.
