What our Christmas ghosts teach us

A tale of two nations

In 1843, England was booming and breaking at the same time. Modern industrialization created unparalleled wealth for some and unprecedented angst for many. London was a city of wage and wealth chasms, in desperate need of a redemptive story.  

Enter Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, an excellent business executive by the metrics of the day (and ours, too, don’t kid yourself). A “man of good credit” with considerable wealth. Efficient. Disciplined. Fearsomely frugal.

And terribly afraid. Utterly miserable. Scrooge’s wealth did not liberate him; it calcified him. It imprisoned him.

Marley, the ghost of regret  

On Christmas Eve, Jacob Marley—Scrooge’s “dead as a doornail” business partner— attempts to rescue his old friend before he, too, is cursed to an afterlife of wandering sorrow.

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” Scrooge says.

“Business! Mankind was my business!” cries Marley, sharing the ultimate lesson he learned far too late.  

“The common welfare was (supposed to be) my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of (what should have been) my business!”

See things differently, Marley implores Scrooge. Your vision is too small, your actions too fearful, your ‘mission’ too narrow. You are not who you could be.

Three ghosts: Expanding your temporal bandwidth

Thomas Pynchon describes the hero’s ability to hold the past, present, and future simultaneously as having a wide “temporal bandwidth” that enables them to be solidly grounded with a “personal density” that cannot be lightly tossed around by the pressures and fears of the now.  

We all know the three ghosts called to broaden Scrooge’s temporal bandwidth in just one night:

• The Ghost of Christmas Past invites him to remember who he once was. To acknowledge the hopes, the wounds, the loves, the choices that launched him. 

  We cannot forget our origin story; it still defines us. There is, sometimes, great treasure buried in the past.

• The Ghost of Christmas Present forces him to see the world as it really is—its hardship and its beauty—beyond his counting house. Crippled Tiny Tim. Debtors’ prisons. Christmas parties. How do you know what you know? There are two desperate children hidden under this ghost’s robe: Ignorance and Want. “Beware the boy, Ignorance, most of all,” the ghost warns. Willful blindness is fatal.  

  You cannot meaningfully harness the past, or fully face the future, if you are unable to acknowledge what is truly happening in the present.

• The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come wordlessly gives Scrooge a glimpse of where his current choices lead. The unvarnished future where his choices will take him. It’s a revelation of consequences Scrooge has never imagined.

  The most haunting specter is the ghost of future regret.

Unbounded renewal

Marley’s message is not condemnation; it is renewal. The ghosts appear not to punish Scrooge but to enlighten, to energize through revelation, reflection, and by the anticipated grief of avoidable regret.

Dickens believed, fiercely and despite all, that when we place our actions and decisions in the full context of humanity and the human condition, we will be a force for good.

This was his great expectation, if you will. That tomorrow need not be bleak; it can be beautiful. That what you do next can be a far, far better thing than you have ever done.  

As 2025 ends and 2026 lies before us, we, too, are now at a moment of renewal.

With our origin stories to ground us, we are not victims of the last 12 months; we can be students of them. We can reflect on what this year has revealed. We can consider the great good (or the great regret) that may come from our future actions…or our failure to act at all.

Hope is not naive for Dickens or for us. It’s defiant. It’s a refusal to let the past and the present have the final word.

When he awakens on Christmas morning, Scrooge doesn’t just think differently, he lives differently. Imagination becomes action. Vision becomes generosity. Fear becomes reckless joy.

Link by link, yard by yard, as Marley might say, a new kind of future is forged.

The power of A Christmas Carol is not that Scrooge gets another day towards a new future of his design. It’s the reminder that we do, too, and the sunrise is just breaking through the curtains.