Christmas Carol
A merry Christmas, God save you!''
Bah!
Humbug!
Christmas a humbug,
You don't mean that,
I am sure.
I do,
Merry Christmas!
What right have you to be merry?
what reason have you to be merry?
You're poor enough.''
Come, then,
What right have you to be
dismal?
what reason have you to be
morose?
You're rich enough.''
Bah!
Humbug.
Don't be cross,
What else can I be,
when I live in such a world of
fools as this
Merry Christmas!
Out upon
merry Christmas.
What's Christmas time
to you
but a time for paying bills
without money;
a time for finding yourself
a year older,
but not an hour
richer;
a time for balancing your
books
and having every item in 'em
through a round dozen of months
presented dead against you?
If I could work my will,
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.
He should!
keep Christmas in your own way, and
let me keep it in mine.
Keep it!
But you don't keep it.
Let me leave it alone, then,
Much good may it do you
Much good it has ever done you!
There are many things from which
I might have derived good, by which
I have not profited, I dare say,
Christmas among the rest.
But I am sure I have always
thought of Christmas time,
when it has come round
apart from the veneration
due to its sacred name and origin,
if anything belonging to it
can be apart from that
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. And therefore,
though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver
in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good,
and will do me good;
and I say,
God bless it!
(materials extracted from Christmas Carol by Charles Dicken)
