NO MUPPETS TO LIGHTEN THE MOOD

This year, I’m reading A Christmas Carol throughout December.

I just got to the bit where Scrooge sits by the fire and the bells start ringing. Dickens is great; you can almost see the long shadows - the chair, the wall, Scrooge himself - cast from the weak light of a meagre fire, flickering in the grate. Then the sound…

Look at this for writing though:

“The bells ceased as they had begun; together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine merchant’s cellar.”

Now you and I know what comes next, but this is still terrifying. Imagine if all the alarms and phones in your house started ringing at once and then suddenly stopped after thirty seconds. That moment of silence, that pause would be dreadful. And Scrooge is alert by this point, having already seen Marley’s face in the door knocker and the horse and carriages barrelling up the stairs. The distant clanking he hears is almost audible to us, and I think, properly scary.

What I don’t seem to be able to do though is separate out the book from The Muppets Christmas Carol. In truth, I don’t really want to, but it’s intriguing how the source material keeps prompting me. As Scrooge was growling home through the thick London fog, for example, my brain resounded with a chorus of:

“There goes Mr Humbug, there goes Mr Grim.”

You’ve got to love the Muppets.

It’s not always obvious I suppose, that A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. I mean it is obvious when you think about it, but the story somehow reminds me much more of a cosy time wrapping presents, or of family watching a mean man find redemption - those things are Christmassy. Being scared out of your wits by spirits and time-travelling apparitions? Not so much. And yet there in the original book, are all the jump scares and shivers, the terrifying and the terrible, satirising the materialism of the age. And not a singing rat or ice-skating penguin in sight.

It’s a short book so I think it needs only a couple of pages a day. Just as well really; I don’t want to have nightmares.