A Christmas Carol

A cold coming they had of it, all the characters in Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Temperatures below freezing, the early onset of darkness, and of course the deep frost rimming the soul of Ebenezer Scrooge.

"'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.'"

I enjoyed the suggestion that as a young boy, he had the imagination to call forth visits from Valentine and Orson, Ali Baba, and other characters from the Arabian Nights, to assuage his loneliness.

"... I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round ... as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."
- Fred, Scrooge's nephew, A Christmas Carol