A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, as a storyteller, I long to decode its secret. I need to know why it has remained the narrative star it is for so very long with such a vast audience. What exactly did Charles Dickens create that keeps us coming back year after year to be absorbed yet again by this tale?
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, of course, the thing Charles Dickens created that holds us in his thrall is Ebenezer Scrooge. This character commands us to revisit the dark environs of his “money-changing hole” with astonishingly universal regularity. We simply cannot get enough of his story and the twisting trail it leads us along.
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because it is essentially a ghost story, filled with things that go bump in the night, most literally, in Scrooge’s case. In the old Alistair Sim film version, which I favor, the gloomy black and white medium, the booming apocalyptic sound effects, Ebenezer’s perpetual scowl. All of it draws me back again year after “rolling year.”
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, all of the above not withstanding, at an essential center of my heart, I am Ebenezer Scrooge. Not because I am a miser of my worldly goods or a dour declarer of “Humbug this” and “Humbug that.” But because of a wound I carry, which Ebenezer also carries, and many others of us carry as well.
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, as a human being on the path of my life in this world, there is a wound in my heart. It is a deep hole, bored by the continual dropping of hot coals of malice or neglect onto that spot when I was very young. This hollow place begs, every day in every way, to be filled, and the only way to fill it is with love. But this love must be received and absorbed, and the problem is that the heart surrounding the wound has been singed by those hot coals into believing itself unlovable.
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because I am certain many of us have been similarly singed by similar hot coals. I don’t ask anyone to admit that, because to do so makes us painfully vulnerable. Please, don’t think it necessary to point out how you are not in the least wounded. If this is true, I rejoice for you and pray for you to remain ever so. I suspect, however, that, more often than not, we have, almost all of us, been carrying our wounds and bearing up under them for decades on end.
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because Ebenezer offers us an answer. He points us toward a road to take to a place where healing can happen, and that place is within ourselves, within each of our hearts. Action is required, of course, as is always the case where redemption stories are concerned, and Scrooge’s story is about redemption for sure. That action is love, in its active verb form. Please, indulge me if I now relate that call to action to myself.
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because it reminds me that, in order to stop feeling unloved, I must love, everybody and everything, as deeply and as constantly as I possibly can. The place inside me that instinctively recognizes truth knows this to be right and good. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. I pray I will be able to do that. And I wish you all a maximally beloved and loving New Year. Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com
RR
A Wrong Way Home – Alice’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 1 – is a FREE Kindle eBook HERE. Enjoy!
Alice’s latest novel is A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 5. Available HERE.
Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving. “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”
Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.
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