A Christmas Carol

I had never read it.  Oh, I have seen the movie many times, but I had never read Charles Dickens' classic, A Christmas Carol.


But I enjoyed it.  I enjoyed it very much. (Thank you, Carrie.)

Here's the thing:  people just don't write like this anymore.  I keep trying to read newer fiction and, while it satisfies me for a short time, I rarely pause to savor wording like this:

The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol (13).

or this:

For the people who were shoveling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee, calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball--better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest--laughing heartily if it went right, and not less heartily if it went wrong (62).

or my favorite:

a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock (95).

This kind of writing just tickles me.  I think we're in too big of a hurry to get through books these days.  We don't want to deal with Dickens-style sentences or descriptions extraneous to the storyline.  I thought this book would be a quick little read, and it was as I completed it in one afternoon, but I paused several times to read phrases again and then read them aloud to my teens as they were too good not to share.

As usual, the book is ever so much better than the movie.  In addition to the quality of prose, the book reveals a greater depth in the characters and is clearer in its theme of our responsibilities to one another as humans:

Mankind was my business.  The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business (25).

This is what I'm "taking to heart" from the book.  It's too easy to waste our lives away in frivolous entertainments, chasing materialism, and excessive busyness.  To waste our lives with self.  May my life not be a wasted opportunity of usefulness.

"Any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, 

whatever it may be, 

will find its mortal life too short 

for its vast means of usefulness. . .

no space or regret can make amends for 

one life's opportunities misused (25).