The Three Ghosts of Christmas

I've dedicated Mondays to posting about books, short and long reads, so I suppose it's appropriate to begin the year with it too. It's a hobby I can never put down, literally. 2017 is also a wonderful year of reads. Glad I made time to do so. Getting through 104 books a year is quite the minimum for me anyway. I don't particularly bother about hitting a number of books read or checking in on GoodReads. Whatever for? That's too sociable for me. :P

Rolled eyes aplenty when I opened up Electric Literature and read Reina Hardy's 'Could The Three Ghosts of Christmas Save the Scrooges of the Trump Era?'—Why 'A Christmas Carol' is especially poignant in 2017. I have ceased to be horrified by the American Presidency and am resigned to all manner of idiocy (and insanity) it chooses to adopt, and resigned to have lost friends who still support the current President’s policies blindly and literally thinks he's the greatest gift to America (WTF riight) by shaking things up and re-setting every bill he can think of.

Arguments run on both sides of the fence. In this day and age, logic doesn't seem to prevail. There's no doubt that the author's tired of what's going on, so are many people. But that's my echo chamber. When I step out of it to look at the other chamber, it's horrifying. I just can't. Yet in a democracy, this is how the dice is rolled, and regardless of the many comments, I think at least half the people are a little screwed over by the systems the country has put into place. Like most people who live in other countries too. There's no perfect system, but surely, we could try to minimize the damage. Unless people on the controlling side with the decisive power don't see the damage. Till uhhh, imminent apocalypse.

We have all read Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' (1843). We should be exceedingly familiar with this tale which is never quite about religion or whatever happens in the Bible. This is a political comment of that Victorian era re-thinking their relationship with Christmas. It's not all bad. It's fairly fuzzy and warm, especially when Ebenezer Scrooge awakes on Christmas morning, a changed man, forever.

I'll just leave it at this paragraph in the article, the concluding thoughts, for us to mull over and have a whirl inside our own heads.

Scrooge jumps out of bed in the morning, and asks what day it is and then he fixes all of his bullshit just like that. Why? Because it’s Christmas Day, and it is not too late. The spirits perform a little theater — the kind of thing I believe in, the kind of thing Dickens believed in, a story in a darkened room — and suddenly Scrooge is feeling exactly what we feel. Our fear. Our love. Our gratitude. It is almost Christmas. It is always almost Christmas. All it would take is one sleepless night, one story, one song to take us to that morning. I just want the spirits to come. I just want to have faith.