Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly old curmudgeon who spurns Christmas as a “ humbug,” is given the chance to redeem himself through the intervention of four Spirits on Christmas Eve. If reading Dickens' s most beloved story doesn't put you in the true spirit of Christmas, you may be beyond redemption. As Scrooge' s nephew Fred said, “ I have always thought of Christmas time . . . as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
Or as Tiny Tim put it more succinctly, “ God bless us every one!”