Charge: Goodwill and the Ghost of an Idea

Every year I evoke the kindly spirt of Dickens’ work around the holidays. What he called the ghost of his ideas continues to inhabit this readers’ thoughts, and, as he had hoped, haunt my house pleasantly. Whether I pick up A Christmas Carol or David Copperfield, his work invites good cheer and goodwill, but also rattles the shackles of greed and chains of ill-will I fear squeeze at my own heart on occasion–ghosts of scroogeries past, awakened by reading his work.

This year, I’m haunted by a shopping excursion from a couple years back, when I grabbed the last of an item on the shelf—an art stamp on my list I’d been searching out for a holiday craft project. And there it was! Just the right flourish. I felt deeply satisfied, and mentally checked off a box, when a woman who was scrutinizing the shelves alongside me sighed. She’d been looking for just that stamp, she said, eyeing it in my hand. For years.

My hand closed over it more tightly.

Truth is, I’ve hardly used it since. It sat in a box of holiday décor this year, unused. I didn’t really need it. In fact, what I took home that day has become more of a burden than a blessing, a ghost of a Christmas past that haunts me with “if onlys” when I run my thumb over the contours of its translucent rubber exterior.

If only I could go back into the past and tell my consumer-minded self that I’d feel more satisfied by opening my hand, rather than closing it. If only I could find that disappointed woman now, and bring the coveted stamp to her doorstep, tied up in a bow.

But we can’t un-scrooge our pasts. We can only unscrooge our presents and our futures.

Dickens’ ghosts of ideas, his call to goodwill, and the underlying themes within the covers of his books, never quite leave us. I love how stories can use acts of selfishness to remind us we’re not alone in our flaws, poverty to remind us of our riches, or ghosts to remind us that we’re mortal—and redeemable.

Even the scroogiest of us, and the scroogiest moments of our lives, can do what Dickens intended through storytelling: “awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts.”

Same for all books we take in and take to heart. As readers, what we read becomes part of our thinking, being, understanding—and our continued growth. All the books of my reading’s past harken to the present and future, and continue to guide and, yes, haunt me, nudging me to face the unpleasant and even harsh truths of experience, through another’s experiences—craft transforming experience into art, and art transforming knowledge into behavior.

May you, too, endeavor to raise ghosts of ideas that will haunt your readers pleasantly and, as Dickens says, “not put [your] readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with [you].”