A Toast to Second Chances
Calling someone a Scrooge or a Grinch is not a compliment, but it really should be. That it’s not is a measure of how much stock we put in first impressions, how quick we are to judge, how little room we make for growth, how reluctant we are to offer opportunities for redemption.
When we hear Scrooge, we think selfish, miserly sourpuss. With reason. In the beginning of A Christmas Carol, that’s how Charles Dickens imagines him. The story starts with the author describing “a tight-fisted, hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.”
That was but a first impression, though it became our lasting one. By the story’s end, Dickens wrote that Scrooge “became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old w…
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