I know it is a bit early to be talking about A Christmas Carol (though I had lunch in a pub last Saturday
which already had its tree complete with lights and sparkle up and running) but this is the final book in my RIP Challenge so, of necessity, it has to be looked at sooner than I normally do. My annual read of this masterpiece is usually Christmas Eve, preferably curled up on the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate and looking at all the presents wrapped and the candles lit.
I have to admit that I have a certain fellow feeling with Ebenezer Scrooge as Christmas is not my most favourite time of year. I find the relentless pressure to produce, as most magazines insist on calling it, 'the best Christmas ever' all too much to bear so now adopt a much more laissez faire attitude towards the whole festive season. One custom I always adhere to, however, is my re-reading of Dicken's A Christmas Carol which surely must be one of the most heart warming stories ever written. There have been endless stage shows, films, musicals, cartoons and TV shows based on this story (the Muppets being a particular favourite of mine!) and its appeal never wavers. I have several copies of this 
book on my shelf. One battered old edition I have had for years, another one from the OUP and then one I could not resist buying a year ago, illustrated by the simply magical Quentin Blake which is now the one I look at the most for the sheer joy of looking at the delightful images he has created.
The opening lines of A Christmas Carol are unforgettable 'Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that......Old Marley was dead as a doornail'. Perfect. What a start. And then, a few pages later when Scrooge goes home '.....they were a gloomy suite of rooms in a lowering pile of a building up a yard where it was so dark that Scrooge was fain to grope with his hands' and what happens when Scrooge looks at his door knocker? It turns into Marley's face. 'Humbug' and Scrooge goes indoors and locks himself in. He sits by a lowering fire, when a disused bell in the corner of the room starts to ring, then deep below there comes a clanking noise as if chains were being dragged and the cellar door swings open with a booming sound....and in comes Marley's ghost.
Everyone who is familiar with the story knows what happens next, the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge as he was when young and hopeful, shows him the girl he loved and lost and how the love of money began to take over his life. The Ghost of Christmas Present takes him and shows him how people are celebrating the current Christmas and, of course, we meet the family of his clerk, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim.
It is the final ghost that is the most chilling of all, the Ghost of Christmas yet to Come. This ghost is silent and terrifying, it is faceless and featureless and the only part of him that Scrooge sees is his hand with his long pointing finger. Scrooge is taken to the deathbed of a lonely, unloved, unmourned 
old man where he lay while his belongings were shared out amongst those gathered in his room. He is taken to a graveyard 'where the wretched man whose name he had now to learn lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place. Walled in by houses, overrun by grass and weeds ....choked up with too much burying....a worthy place!'
Scrooge creeps trembling towards the neglected grave and reads EBENEZER SCROOGE. The Phantom is still silent, the pointed finger still there. 'O tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!' Scrooge catches the spectral hand 'it shrunk, collapsed and dwindled down into a bedpost' and Scrooge wakes up in his own bed.
Well, we all know what happens next. The joyous realisation that all the spirits visited him in one night, that it is Christmas Day and he has time to make reparation, the delirious delight in which Scrooge sends the delivery boy to buy the biggest Turkey he can find and have it delivered to the Cratchits, never ever fails to lift my heart and make me feel that perhaps Christmas isn't so bad after all!
And anyone who is not moved by Tiny Tim's 'God Bless us, every one' can, in the words of Scrooge 'be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart'.....
