A Christmas Carol.

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A Christmas Carol

Ebenezer Scrooge is a tightfisted miser who has only one purpose in life, to extort as much money and profit he can from anything and everything. As with all things, too much of one thing is bad for you; Scrooge's miserly ways are catching up with him. His cheap ways have not brought him any friends, quite the contrary; they have brought him derision and scorn. He was thought of as "a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone!" A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire. As we can see, he wasn't a very pleasant person, but that is to be expected of people who work around money all their lives. Money became more than a possession to Scrooge, all his coins were his little children. He hoarded them and kept them safe in their strongboxes.

To give away but one petty coin, would have been asking Scrooge to give away part of his soul. He was greedy and crooked to the bone. "No warmth could warm him, no wintry weather chill him." However much you may want to consider Scrooge blameless, after all, a man's behaviour and temperament is directly linked to the environment he works in, it is all too clear that he brought this sour disposition and attitude upon himself. "Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, 'My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?'" Scrooge had an inherent fear of opening up to people. All his years of working with money have turned him into a recluse. He was a unique type of man, a man who became a hermit while living in society. He retreated into his shell of seclusion and misconceptions whenever he was prompted to be sociable or generous. Too much money can go to your head. Scrooge would have stayed like this 'till the end of his days until one night, the most remarkable thing happened.

Scrooge was one of those men who took little joy in the happiness of others around them. He cared nothing for sentimentalities and he looked upon the upcoming Christmas festivities with thinly veiled contempt. Christmas was "a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer". He could despised Christmas, and he especially despised fools who thought it fun and joyous, " . . . every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart." These famous lines were uttered by Scrooge on Christmas Eve, 7 years to the day, of his old partner, Jacob Marley's death. Then as Scrooge was about to enter his marvelously slum-like mansion, he looked at his doorknocker, and nearly fainted dead away with fright. "Scrooge...saw in the knocker...not a knocker, but Marley's face." Bad omens breed ill times to come, and this was most definitely a bad omen. "As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again."
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This was the beginning of a very long night in which he was visited firstly by the 'Ghost of Marley'. Both Marley and Scrooge were cut from the same cloth; they were miserly and cheap. However, Marley was dead and he was suffering for all his sins. He was being punished for being such a transgressor. He broke the most fundamental rule of Christianity. He hoarded his money and did not share with the poor. Because of this he was not accepted into the kingdom of God and was condemned to eternal misery. Marley's mission was simple; he ...

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