Isaiah 10:1-3 “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees to deprive the poor of their rights. What will you do on the day of reckoning… Where will you leave your riches?”

These verses of Scripture bring to mind the words of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, protagonist of Charles Dickens’ beloved classic yuletide tale, A Christmas Carol: “Are there no prisons, no workhouses, no public treadmills? If the many would rather die than go there, then let them die, and decrease the surplus population.” So masterfully developed are the characters of the three antagonists of Scrooge, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, that we recognize them not as three, but as one that exists within each of us, through which the miracles of Christmas are born. Did Dickens have the model of the Holy Trinity in mind in developing the concept of the three spirits, and if so, to which member of the Trinity would each spirit correspond?

Certainly, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus; the gospels of Matthew and Luke tell us that. Isn’t the birth of any child a joyous time to celebrate, and how much more that the child is the birth of a promise of unlimited gifts. Who wouldn’t joyfully celebrate that! Surely, the spirit of Christmas Present is this very observation!

As every Christmas Present also becomes part of our own Christmas past, and the son resembles the father more each year, we develop a relationship with the season, which is God the Father himself. So, the spirit of Christmas Past must be that of the Creator, the Almighty.

Now, each approaching Christmas is a Christmas yet to come, and as Scrooge himself realized, a clear and immediate choice. It is the choice to be forgotten in the darkness of death, or to decouple the shackles of greed and gluttony we forge in life--link by link, yard by yard; to abandon our squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous inclinations, and to be remembered in the light of our lives of love in fellowship. The ghost of Christmas yet to come, the Holy Spirit, offers us this choice each year, each and every day of our lives. Where shall we leave our riches, if we do not share them generously?

Paul W. Richardson