The name of Ebenezer Scrooge has become synonymous with miserliness, greed, grumpiness—everything we don’t want to be. Charles Dickens’, in his classic story, A Christmas Carol, describes him as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner,” who hated Christmas, saying: “… 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.” Yikes!
Still, it’s really too bad, and I believe that Scrooge gets a bad rap, because by the end of the story, he’s changed his ways and become a whole new man. One might even say—and I do!—that he’s repented. To the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, he promises, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” Indeed, he does. The final paragraphs of the story tell us that Scrooge “knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” To this Dickens adds, “May that be truly said of us, and all of us!”
Okay, so what does it mean to keep Christmas well? Throughout the entire year? What does that look like? In our daily activities: in our work, in our relationships, in our service to others, in our participation in church, in our finances. For Ebenezer Scrooge, this was primarily a matter of generosity, joyfulness, fairness, kindness, and care for people in need. Scrooge “became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.” But as praiseworthy as these behaviors and characteristics might be, I wonder: Is that all there is to keeping Christmas well? Or might there be more? And if there is more, how would we know what keeping Christmas well really means?
If we’re going to answer these questions, we must remember the essential event of Christmas: the birth of Jesus. Yet, this seemingly insignificant event was, in fact, the watershed event of history, the entrance of the Word of God into human life as human flesh. Keeping Christmas well means paying close attention, not only to what happened at Christmas, but especially to its meaning—its implications for us personally, and for the world. In truth, Christmas changes everything, including how you and I should live each day.