Cathryn’s Musing: Happy Holidays!

Today is Christmas Eve.  See our glorious tree?  The presents are wrapped, and the dinner list is made.  All we have left to do is clean the house and shop for Sunday’s meal.

A tradition in our house on Christmas Eve each year is to re-read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  My mom was an English literature teacher for many years, and the book and movie were staples of our holidays.  Do you remember these lines from the famous opening Stave?

“Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—Old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.  It was cold, bleak, biting weather.”

“Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone.  A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as a flint…secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue…”

“The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters.  Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal.  But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part.  Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to wam himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

“A Merry Christmas, uncle!  God save you!” cried a cheerful voice.  It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!” … “Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

I loved Ebenezer Scrooge.  When I was young, of all the great books and the great literature my mom kept in our house, I most wanted to be like Charles Dickens and develop the ability to create stories with such memorable characters.  I still aspire to be like him.

One wonderful blessing of my 2011 is that an editor in a publishing house saw something in one of my stories that made her decide to publish it.  My Harlequin Superromance, “Something to Prove,” is releasing on January 3^rd.  For everyone who enters a comment on any of the Moody Muses blog posts from now until the new year, I’ll enter your name in a drawing to mail you an author copy.

Thanks for reading.  If you have any Christmas Eve or other holiday traditions in your home, I’d love to hear them.

Happy Holidays!