Slices of Life: Scrooge Got a Chance, Why Not Marley?

This column was written by Lisa Gibalerio

It’s Christmas Eve.  How’s your holiday spirit holding up?  I hope you’re functioning well and are not, say, curled up in a corner mumbling: “I can’t take any more carols.  Please, no more cookies. Someone make it all stop!”

For those who experience stress this time of year, I suppose the good news is that it was a shorter season than usual.  However, that it was condensed seems to have resulted in magnified intensity, and ultimately, less time to accomplish all that needed to be accomplished.   

December is a month of contrasts.  It’s one of the darkest months of the year, but it’s made bright by colorful twinkle lights and, this year at least, a glowing full moon and lots of freshly fallen snow. It’s a month rife with festive happenings.  However, with all that merry-making comes traffic, too-few parking spaces, long check-out lines, and scary amounts of much sugar.

When I need to seek refuge from the strains of the season, I do so late in the evening under warm covers where I return to a book I revisit each December:  Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.  Each time I read this classic, first published 170 years ago, I am struck by something new.

This year, I have been caught up with the notion of how very fortunate miserly old Scrooge was to have been given a peek into the future. Not only was his imminent death foretold to him by the Ghost of Christmas Future, but he was also given the opportunity to make meaningful changes that would allow him to actually extend his years on Earth. How amazing is that? Furthermore, as a direct result of those changes, he will have a dramatically different and, one is left to assume, much more comfortable afterlife experience.

I know it’s just a story, but this makes me feel really badly for Marley, forced to travel the world incessantly (“No rest. No peace.”) and burdened with untold pounds of heavy and cumbersome chains fettered to him.  It is suggested that he too was a bitter, cranky, twisted soul, but even so, why didn’t some ghost visit him in the weeks before his death? Why was he not told what he conveyed to Scrooge, that “I am here tonight to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate”?

Then I got to thinking: in some cases, we don’t require visits from ghosts to help us evade death.  We have, at our fingertips, much of the information we need to extend our lives.  We know that by adopting a clean lifestyle, e.g., eating healthfully, exercising regularly, drinking moderately, we can add years to our lives.

But, almost immediately, I felt hopeless again.  There are too many people who did all those things and died young anyway.  It begs the question:  do we have any control or not?  “Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?” asks the Ghost of Christmas Present.

It’s Christmas Eve, best not to follow me into the dark recesses of my mind.  Not today anyway.  We’ll return to these thoughts at another time . . .

For those of you who are heading out today and tomorrow to visit family and friends, I wish you safe travels and many warm and happy moments.  

And may it be said of you that you “knew how to keep Christmas well”!