A Ghost of an Idea

“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. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!” — A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

MANILA, Philippines - Thus, promised the reborn Ebenezer Scrooge by his tombstone where ended his terrible tryst with the three specters sent by his dead partner, Jacob Marley, who wanted to save him from perdition.

Charles Dickens’ classic story of redemption has seen all kinds of retelling in all kinds of media, the latest from writer-director Robert Zemeckis, using the motion-capture technology that became box-office sensation with The Polar Express and Beowulf, in which the faces and movements of real actors are transformed into computer-generated cartoons.

It is a story that gets richer with each retelling, whether in film, opera, ballet, an all-black Broadway musical (Comin’ Uptown, 1979), a BBC mime production (Men of Goodwill: Variations on A Christmas Carol, 1947), a Jim Henson Muppet production directed by his son Brian, featuring music by Paul Williams with Michael Caine as Scrooge (1992) and animation (Disney’s A Christmas Carol, 2009). But from the oldest known film version (Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost, 1901) to the newest IMAX 3-D, the moral of every man in search of his better self prevails.

I acquired my Mark Summers illustrated copy of Dickens’ immortal prose in five staves in 2005 when my family and I last spent Christmas in California, as a paean to my youth, driven to love literature the first time I read the story as a freshman in high school back in 1970, during one boring night when I had to tend my mother’s sari-sari store. Back then, Christmas was as sedate as the bicho-bicho we ate after the misa de gallo and as filial as the pagmamano which my hordes of cousins on the Patag side diligently accorded our elders for coveted shiny coins.

So many adaptations had been made from that time on, the most popular being A Christmas Carol (1984), starring George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge for which he received an Emmy Award nomination and Scrooged (1988), a remake in a contemporary setting with Bill Murray. The latter, directed by Richard Donner, has as protagonist Francis “Frank” Xavier Cross (Murray) — a conceited, cynical television programming executive. Like his progenitor, Cross’ wealth was amassed at the expense of his soul.

There is even a Jewish reprise in the outstanding CBS television series, Northern Exposure, which used the Victorian tale as the basis for its episode Shofar, So Good (1994), depicting the Ghosts of Yom Kippur Past, Present, and Future visiting the New York doctor lost in Alaska, Joel Fleischman, to encourage him to truly atone for his sins.

By this time, I have reached midway into my Biblical lifespan, trying to guide all our three sons to the essence of Christmas as it was on that first night in Bethlehem when the star of David guided the magi to the Savior — love for our brethren, especially the least of them. As Bob Crachit told his family about their youngest member, Tiny Tim: He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.

It is recounted that Dickens, who was haunted by the tragic fall from grace of his family, that led to their incarceration in London’s Marshalsea debtor’s prison, vowed to write in 1843 “a very cheap pamphlet,” he called “An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child,” which later metamorphosed into A Christmas Carol.

One hundred sixty-six years later, this ghost of an idea, so many times and ways retold, still mesmerizes kids from one to 92, proving that its author has not labored in vain. In fact, the frontispiece which Dickens wrote for this novella was prophetic:

I have endeavored in this ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, C.D.