It has become a custom with me for past few years to end the Reading Challenges with rereading of this timeless classic. For this year I picked up the Puffin Clothbound edition. This was one of the fourteen books published in the series in 2019. With illustrations by Mark Peppe, the gorgeous red cover literally takes away your breath!

Christmas won’t be a real Christmas without rewatching Die Hard and retreading A Christmas Carol.

Some classics magically make you feel better when you read them over and over again. Especially when we’re getting through one of the most tragic, compelling, challenging years of our lives, the kind of amazing classics help us remember what is really important in our lives: importance of family, intimacy, happiness, kindness and sharing.

I felt like Ebenezer Scrooge at this special day, but instead of ghost coworker of mine, my old self revisited me ( nope, thankfully I’m not delusional and I didn’t start drinking in the morning. ) it was more like walking through memory lane of your life. I think with the inspirational light shone through this story, we all rethink our lives, rethink the times we got bittersweet, tasteless, unhappy, grumpy just like Mr. Scrooge did all the time. It was like walking in the dark without hope, till we raise our heads and realize there are still stars shining to light our path!

This meaningful, poignant, powerful has unique magic to warm our hearts and whisper to our ears : everything will be all right!

I want to share my favorite quotes of this one of my all time favorite reads:
“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

“There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

“You fear the world too much,' she answered gently. 'All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off, one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

“I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”

I didn't expect to like A Christmas Carol because, essentially, this thing about ghosts and changing attitudes and being better people is been going around way before I was even born, and it has always felt like a utopia for me.
Why don't be a good person every day of the year? Christmas is, after all, a social construct.

But… nothing, I was right since the beginning.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a horrible person who decides to change his attitude - hoping that’ll last - because he’s afraid of what human beings have been afraid of since the invention of religion: the afterlife.
Now that he has proof that he’ll be damned for eternity, he gives money here and there, not because he wants to help those people but because he’s relieved he still has a chance to not wander the earth as a ghost in chains forever.

So, after all, he does what he does for himself, while we see people of good hearts thinking about others like the Cratchits hoping for the best about Tiny Tim’s future or Scrooge’s own nephew’s wish for his uncle to have some peace of mind - when what they should do in reality is kill the old bastard.

The reason why this novella is, after all these decades, still considered a classic is due to Charles Dickinson's suggestive language - Death’s pointed finger on Scrooge’s grave is the most evocative scene I've ever read in a book and truly shows how great of an author he was in comparison of some of his colleagues.

↠ 4 stars