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You arrived at this page by selecting:Every year in the run up to Christmastime we remember the late departed and much missed Ebeneezer Scrooge. Ebeneezer, or Eb to his mates, was the sad victim of a gross miscarriage of justice in the court of public opinion.
Why was Scrooge innocent? That's easy.
364 days of the year all his contemporaries were exactly the same as Scrooge. On December 25 they all changed. He didn't. How can he be guilty for not doing anything except treating it the same as any other day? If anybody is guilty it is the other ones, not him. They were doing the same as Scrooge every other day of the year. Scrooge is a hero of consistency. The rest of them look like 1 day a year hypocrites.
A while ago on television there was coverage of a demonstration against nuclear power. The demonstrators were wearing home-made costumes designed to make them look like nuclear workers, those white radiation protection suits, with skull and crossbones motifs. They knew that to show how horrible something is you sometimes have to appear like it. But Scrooge was there more than 100 years before them.
The real message Scrooge was trying to get across was not how horrible he was on one day, but that many people are like that all year round. Scrooge does us a service by picking Christmas Day because it is the best day to show us a contrast, and thus reveal what a difference one man can make, for good or ill.
As for the ghosts, well we all know ghosts don't exist. But Scrooge was under a lot of strain. It takes guts to stand out against the crowd. The ghosts were just ghosts of christmases anyway. The other 364 days of the year are far more important. At the end Scrooge is turned by the ghosts. But did he just become another one day a year hypocrite, or did he really change for good? We are not told. But it certainly looks genuine, and that's a much nicer end to the story.
Genuine goodwill to all men is a 365 day a year affair. Confine it to one day a year and its fake. Scrooge shows us that.
So Scrooge was a good guy really!
