Well, it's the New Year, well and truly, now. And my mind is turning toward the question of "Resolutions." In my case, I've given up the conventional idea of resolutions, since focusing attention on my faults just makes me depressed, and self-critical, and ends up being self-defeating. Instead, in recent years, I've given myself a creative project to complete in the course of a single year, so that I can look back and say: "This is what I did in 2009, that I am proud of." And, in the course of working on the discipline to complete that project, hopefully break myself of bad habits along the way as a side-effect.

For this year, I've decided to slow-write a proper novel (as opposed to the mad speed-dash of National Novel Writing Month). And for a plot, my mind is starting to gravitate toward the idea that first popped up in these verses about the Winter Gift-Giver, that I wrote a few years ago.

Anyway, that got me thinking of all the predecessors my little story has (will have?), and how many of them rely on the trope of saving the existance of Christmas itself, and that put my mind back to this passage from the very first modern Christmas story: Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Reconstructions in film and on stage can't hold a candle to the power of Dickens' original words, so I thought I'd share them here.

Charles Dickens' point is as valid and worthy of minding as it was when he first penned it:

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

``Spirit! are they yours?'' Scrooge could say no more.

``They are Man's,'' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ``And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!'' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ``Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!''

``Have they no refuge or resource?'' cried Scrooge.

``Are there no prisons?'' said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ``Are there no workhouses?''

The bell struck twelve.