What ‘A Christmas Carol’ can teach us about 2024

It’s funny that the word “scrooge” has become part of the language, drawn, of course, from the classic Charles Dickens tale “A Christmas Carol.” In today’s world, “scrooge” is a particularly durable term, technically meant to connote someone who is tight with a dollar, especially a rich person who is callous and ungenerous. But it can also be applied to anyone who is resentful or sour or otherwise dismissive of the kindness of the human heart. It’s also pretty handy to slap down someone who is not on board with an otherwise festival atmosphere, a generalized synonym for “grouch.” 

(Of course, the word “grinch” is even more delicious and evocative, serves much the same purpose and even has a similar literary pedigree; I sometimes think that the greatest underappreciated genius of both Dickens and Dr. Seuss was their gift at inventing names that magically capture their characters.)

That’s certainly how the story of Ebenezer Scrooge begins. But, as we all know, it’s not how it ends. If you were to come into “A Christmas Carol” halfway through, you’d walk away thinking a “scrooge” was a word for a joyous, exuberant, indiscriminately big-hearted person brimming with spontaneity and gratitude. 

We don’t want to say it out loud, but how “scrooge” has come to be defined is proof enough that the second-chance, Christmas-morning ending of “A Christmas Carol” has never been quite fully convincing. It’s kind of a universal experience with the play that the actor who plays Scrooge — and this includes the gifted Mike Ryan, taking on the role in the current production of Santa Cruz Shakespeare — is more believable and even relatable (and paradoxically probably having more fun) as the miserly villain at the play’s beginning than the mensch at the end. The same goes for the Grinch.

We recognize that “A Christmas Carol” is a fairy tale, that the overnight redemption it portrays is satisfying in a storytelling kind of way, but never as neat or complete in the real lived-in world. It’s aspirational, in much the same way that, say, the “promised land” that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. evoked in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech the day before he died is. When pressed, only the most giddily scriptural of us would cop to actually believing in a real-world “promised land.” But it’s useful, maybe even necessary, as a goad to envision and build a better world.

What none of us wants is “A Christmas Carol: The Sequel,” in which Scrooge wakes up a week or two later, on some dreary January morning, in a bad mood and again feeling the tug of his old parsimonious ways. Still, the 180-degree redemption is theoretically possible because, the story teaches us, Scrooge is fundamentally a good person, embittered by his experiences and his unacknowledged grief, obsessed with what was taken away from him and not the abundance that he still has.

In that way, “A Christmas Carol” has come to symbolize the traditional experience of the month of December, in which are wrapped Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the winter solstice and the transition from the old year to the new one. This year, December is especially poignant, fitted as it is between November — when a historically brutalizing election season reached its demoralizing (at least to half the country) conclusion — and January — when the consequences of November’s decision become all too real. December is the interregnum, the quiet before the storm, the moment in the Civil War film “Glory” when the Black Union soldiers sing spirituals and testify the night before they are to meet their doom on the battlefield. The bleak, cold mornings of January will come soon enough. Why not embrace a chance to enjoy the “dark sacred night” of December, to paraphrase Louis Armstrong?

The U.S. electorate has been diverging into two mutually hostile sides for decades, and 2025 could bring that painful division to a kind of a climax that many of us are dreading. The worst-case scenarios are chilling, even apocalyptic. To summon the courage and energy to preserve constitutional democracy means to hold fast to the faith that this wayward country is still redeemable, that Americans are still one people. 

For many, the first exposure to “A Christmas Carol” — be it as a novella, a movie, stage play or a musical — came in childhood. And many parents feel a tug to bring their children to it, despite the ghost-story elements. (Raise your hand if you were utterly terrified of the silent, shrouded figure of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.) In its simplicity and directness, the beloved Dickens tale is easy to grasp and to internalize for children. But it should never be dismissed as kid stuff. 

For reasons profoundly political and commercial, we all live in an atomized world, and the momentum is always pointed to more isolation, more detachment — because too many scrooges profit from such a world. But, if you’re able to set aside the well-earned apprehension of the season, December is all about commonality, and “A Christmas Carol” is a vital part of that sense of human possibility. The whipsaw conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge deserves to be looked at skeptically. I wouldn’t trust Scrooge’s newfound benevolence to last beyond lunchtime. But on another level, it’s a compact dramatization of the journey to be more fully human. And it resets us all on a lodestar, to draw from a source of strength in what may be a traumatic time ahead. It’s perhaps an oversimplified but nevertheless powerful articulation of the redemption better expressed in “Amazing Grace”: “[I] was blind, but now I see.”

Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s production of “A Christmas Carol” plays through Dec. 24 at the Veterans Memorial Building in Santa Cruz.

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