December 13: Christmas Carol, Musical Blessing, Spirits

“What is the matter?” asked the Spirit.

“Nothing,” said Scrooge.  “Nothing.  There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night.  I should like to have given him something:  that’s all.”

The Spirit in question is the Ghost of Christmas Past, and Scrooge has just seen himself as a lonely schoolboy on Christmas, abandoned by his family, spending the day with his only companions:  Ali Baba, Robin Crusoe, the Sultan’s Groom, and Friday.  The characters from the books he reads.  Scrooge has been moved by his younger self.  He’s feeling pity and remorse, probably for the first time in the entire book.

I think it’s significant that one of the first people for which Scrooge feels empathy is a boy singing a Christmas carol.  There’s something powerful about Christmas music.  It has the ability to raise spirits, lift people out of their tiny universes of problems and worries.  Scrooge experiences that power in the passage above.  He wants to help the boy who was singing at his office door on Christmas Eve.

At my office, I have my computer tuned to an online radio station that plays Christmas music.  It’s been serenading me for a few weeks now.  When I found out my wife had lost her job a couple weeks ago, I sat at my desk the next work day and listened to Jackie Evancho sing “Pie Jesu.”  It was gorgeous, moving, transcendent.  It parted the dark clouds hanging over my head at that moment.  My throat got thick, my eyes got soggy, and my spirits lifted.

For me, Bing Crosby crooning “White Christmas” or Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” reminds me of simpler times.  Easier times.  Times when happiness was watching The Wizard of Oz on TV with my brothers and sisters, eating bowls and bowls of popcorn.  My mother baking a ham on Christmas Eve, and the whole house smelling of citrus and clove.  I didn’t need a Kindle Fire HD or an iPod touch to experience Christmas joy.  I needed Burl Ives telling me to “have a holly, jolly Christmas…”

I am blessed at work by that Christmas music, because it reminds me to think like a child.

It is Saint Marty’s Ghost of Christmas Past.

Sing with me, "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas..."