I’ve suggested a new and a middle-aged Christmas book, but we mustn’t leave out the standard so I will add an age-old classic. My first memory of A Christmas Carol was a production by Hardy Baptist Church at Christmas. I was in first grade, and Daddy played Scrooge. Perhaps that explains my inability to have Christmas without the book and my obsession with sharing it with all those I care about. I started on long trips home for Christmas in the station wagon. With our three kids as a captive audience, I read it aloud. Seven years of teaching junior high language arts gave me a new set of listeners. Every year, it was my December read-aloud.
There are ubiquitous movies that have been made of the book, of course, but none of them can hold Scrooge’s candle to Dickens’ original. They miscast characters. They leave out favorite scenes and lines. (I would love to have such a wonderful curse for my enemies – both of them – as the one pronounced by Scrooge, “Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled in his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”} They add extraneous information that adds nothing to the tale, like a backstory for Scrooge’s dead sister. The worst change has Scrooge showing up for Christmas dinner with the Cratchits when everybody knows he ate with his nephew and had a jolly time catching Bob Cratchit coming in late to work the next morning before divulging the change that has taken place. (I have a vivid memory of Daddy as Scrooge giving Bob Cratchit what for before hilariously revealing his transformation.)
Since so many friends and family know about this passion, I have been gifted with a number of either classic or classy version to go with the cheap Scholastic paperback I used with my students. So, the only question this year is which version do I read. There is that cheap one from Scholastic with my notes for making sure my students didn’t miss any really good lines. I could read the ancient copy that contains a collection of three of Dickens’ Christmas books. I will not be reading the copy with parts abbreviated since I consider abridging the work at least a misdemeanor, if not a cardinal sin. That leaves me with a hard choice among the remaining three beautifully done works, but I have decided to focus on the copy handsomely illustrated by P. J. Lynch.
And I use my yard decoration with Tiny Tim’s words to send my Christmas wish to all my blog readers.