“The Business” Of Christmas
Dec 21st, 2019 | By Dr. Jim Eckman
In Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” the dialogue between the ghost of Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge is most enlightening. As Scrooge protests Marley’s intervention, he declares that Marley “was always a good man of business,” to which Marley responds: “Business! . . . Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business: charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business.” The feverish materialism of the Christmas season seems to side with Scrooge’s miserly greed, not Marley’s redeemed perspective.