By Mary O’KEEFE

It has been a terrible week: the shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island, the mass shooting in Australia targeting Jewish people celebrating the first day of Hanukkah, the death of Rob and Michele Reiner allegedly at the hands of their younger son and then the news that FBI agents, working with local law enforcement, stopped a plot to set off a series of bombs on New Year’s in various areas in Southern California. I am not saying that one death or one act of violence is more horrific than another but it just seemed this week that as we got one bad story we were hearing about another one. And no matter how many times we see it, we always seem to be surprised at the evil humans can do. 

I started writing this column prior to the tragedies of this week and I think it fits in with trying to find hope and rebirth, which is what this time of year has been about for centuries: 

The movie “A Christmas Carol” scared me when I was a kid. I saw the 1955 version (even though there was a newer one) at our local movie house; the newer version was not shown there. The ghosts were so creepy, it was in black-and-white and when [spoiler alert] Scrooge woke up on Christmas morning a changed man …even that was scary. I was going to try to watch “A Christmas Carol” again but then I found “The Man Who Invented Christmas.”

This is such a wonderful film. It was released in 2017 and is the story of how Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.”

I love this film for so many reasons. First, it really depicts the art of writing. Dickens spends a lot of time alone in a room talking to himself though in reality he was talking to the characters he was creating … and they talked back to him! He collected interesting names all of the time, saw inspiration in everyday things and in the middle of writing … that is, once he hit his stride … someone always seemed to interrupt his train of thought. 

Then there is the “What have you done lately?” aspect of Dickens’ desperation. I have to be honest – though I knew his work I did not know much about the author.

Dickens had massive success with “Oliver Twist” but then he had three not so successful books: “Barnaby Rudge” in 1841, “Martin Chuzzlewitt” in 1843/44 and “American Notes” in 1842 about his travels to America touring with “Oliver Twist.” 

So publishers, who apparently agreed Dickens was a genius, thought his successful writing career might be over. This film crosses what is historically correct with taking license in other aspects. What was true was that the publishers did not believe in the Christmas ghost story Dickens was pitching; after all Christmas was not popular in the mid 1800s.

In the early 1800s, Christmas in London was not really festive so it is not surprising that Dickens’ publisher did not understand the need to highlight a holiday that was not that popular … but then they didn’t understand Dickens’ vision.

In the movie, one of Dickens’ inspirations came from Tara, an Irish housemaid who worked in his home. This is part of the creative license; however, it does nicely explain the ghosts in “A Christmas Carol.” There were a lot of stories about the veil being thin, not just during Samhain [Halloween] but also during the winter season. In the movie Dickens overhears Tara reading “Varney the Vampire.” That runs along the same line as the veil between the worlds being thinnest during the winter.

In this film actor Dan Stevens portrays Dickens. He does so with a crazed enthusiasm mixed with a feeling that nothing he writes will be good enough … in other words, the same feeling every writer I have ever known feels. 

We get to see the real characters who may have inspired Dickens, from Scrooge to the Ghost of Christmas Present, and through this approach we see “A Christmas Carol” in a more personal way. 

The one thing I took from this film was hope. Lately we have seen the rich getting richer while the rest of us struggle with increasing prices. 

Below are some quotes from the book:

“What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older and not an hour richer. … If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge, indignantly, ‘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. He should!” (That’s a bit harsh but close to what we hear presently from some leaders and CEOs.) “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”

That last is one of the best lines in any book. Everything we need to know about this miser is in this one line. 

So where does my hope come from? Well, Scrooge was horrible. He was probably based on not just one man but on many Dickens had met over the years. Despite whether this type of person existed, with everything Dickens had faced as a young man he still wrote Scrooge as someone who found redemption. Scrooge saw nothing wrong with his way of thinking and yet after seeing … really seeing … those around him he began to change. 

But I think in the end it was fear that inspired him to change … his fear of the next life, fear of what chains he may carry into the next life and fear he will leave a stain, not a mark, on history. 

The book was really self-published by Dickens and sold out quickly. It was a huge success and more importantly charitable contributions increased dramatically after the book was published. Christmas had become a time to give to others as well as a time to share with family and friends. 

So here is where my hope can be found: I hope that those CEOs who need to make more, while workers get less and are laid off, will be visited by three ghosts this Christmas and will understand the true meaning of the season. 

Thursday is expected to be in the low 80s, and then we will see a cooling trend starting on Friday. The big story is the storm coming our way, which looks like the peak of the rain will be on Christmas Eve through Christmas Day. The temperatures will be much cooler – in the low to mid-60s. Because it is so far off there is not a lot of information regarding how strong the winds may be, however winds are predicted, according to NOAA.