This Christmas, don’t let the bell strike 12 before you act

Offering to take the kid to "A Christmas Carol" sounded like one of those duties dads are goaded into performing during the holiday break.

You know the drill: String a few lights, wrap a few gifts, try not to pass out in the eggnog -- and agree to go to the new Christmas movie that somehow manages to be more vapid than the year before.

Amelia couldn't imagine her old man would be interested in yet another animated movie. So when I suggested "A Christmas Carol," she seemed surprised -- and just a little suspicious.

Little did Amelia know she was my shill. The Dickens story has been a secret delight of mine since childhood. I reread sections of the story each year.

The Robert Zemeckis movie succeeds on many levels, but it is successful most of all because it is true to Dickens' politics. In October 1843, Dickens worked feverishly to illustrate the spirit of Christmas through the dramatically disparate lives of the classes. He finished his story in about a month. Masking the sting of truth in the finery of entertainment was his challenge and his art.

Those who remember "A Christmas Carol" whimsically were either immature or inattentive. It was the original nightmare before Christmas, a politically charged prose poem intended to smack the smug, unfeeling, and the comfortable.

A column can't do justice. So I'll pick one encounter between Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present:

"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe,

'but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?"

"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a 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 shriveled 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 abide 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.

If you're not at once chilled and thawed by that passage, you're overdue for a visit from the ghost of Jacob Marley.

Meanwhile, God bless us, every one.

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.