“The movie was not as good as the book” is a cliché for a reason: they rarely ever are!  I have enjoyed several versions of “A Christmas Carol” in movie form, but none of them can capture the vivid descriptions, the folksy attitude, and the full spirit of Dickens’ book – though several of the silver screen versions come reasonably close.  Yet no movie quite captures the spirit of Charles Dickens.  His homey narration style is part of it – as if he were very personally guiding you through the experience.  Then there are the classic Dickensian descriptions which place you right at the scene!  His portrayal of the Christmas food which adorned the local grocers, “that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed” literally made MY mouth water!  Many would imitate his style, but few can paint word pictures like Dickens!”  Phrases like: “Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore …” had me chuckling and clucking out loud throughout.

One of the marked differences between the movies and the book, in my view, was the growing nature of Scrooge’s awakening.  The movies seem to emphasize his hard nature, which is only broken by the dramatic events at the conclusion.  But the book emphasizes a more gradual awakening.  At the beginning of the second visit, Scrooge tells the Ghost of Christmas Present that the vision of the previous evening contained a lesson which was already at work in him. Scrooge tells the final spectre at the outset of his visit that “I hope to be another man from what I was.”  Even as he is viewing the scenes the last ghost shows him, it says “he had been revolving in his mind a change of life”, and when he sees his own grave, he calls out to the spirit: “I am not the man I was”.  In Dickens’ book, it was not that he was becoming; he was already a different man!  Scrooge’s repentance was already firmly in place even before what is usually presented as the decisive scene. 

A Christmas Carol evokes as much pathos as any book I’ve read, but it is not merely emotional froth.  It paints a wonderful picture of what genuine repentance looks like in a very specific situation – and of how things can be different if we take repentance seriously.  The climactic scene with the final spirit contains one of the great spiritual lessons in literature.  Before he looks at the grave of the man who was not mourned because of his miserliness, Scrooge implores the spirit: “Man’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead …. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”  A better statement of Biblical repentance and it consequences (see Ezekiel 18:21-23) would be hard to find!    

Great literature does more than entertain; it enlightens and inspires.  A Christmas Carol does all of that, and more.  I hope you’ll set aside some time to read it this Christmas season.  I think you’ll come away touched – and determined to live a better life this Christmas season, by being more caring and generous to those God has placed around you.

Plus … it didn’t hurt that I got to spend the first day of my Christmas season reading a book that looked like this (I picked it up at a used bookstore in Rye, England) :